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- [00:00]
American Express Representative
With the American Express Gold Card, I.
- [00:02]
Molly White
Can earn four times membership rewards points at US Supermarkets.
- [00:05]
American Express Representative
So with all these groceries, I'm also getting points. Learn more@americanexpress.com US Explore Gold Terms and Points Cap apply.
- [00:18]
John Cameron Mitchell
This is John Cameron Mitchell and my new fiction podcast series Cancellation island stars Holly Hunter as Karen, a wellness influencer who launches a rehab for the recently canceled. In the future we will all be canceled for 15 minutes, but don't worry, we'll take you from broke to woke or your money back. Cancellation Island's revolutionary rehab therapies like bad touch football, anti racism spin class and mandatory ayahuasca ceremonies are designed to force the council to confront their worst impulses. But everything starts to fall apart when people start disappearing. Karen, where have you brought us Cancellation island? Where a second second chance might just be your last. Listen to Cancellation island on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here?
- [01:19]
Mark Seale
Ow. Go slower.
- [01:20]
John Cameron Mitchell
From Blumhouse TV, iheart podcasts and ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he.
- [01:28]
Nathan King
Unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend.
- [01:30]
John Cameron Mitchell
I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi and what's the way to find a.
- [01:35]
Nathan King
Missing person Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously.
- [01:38]
John Cameron Mitchell
Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio.
- [01:40]
Nathan King
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.
- [01:43]
Molly White
To your favorite shows.
- [01:46]
Robert Evans
I'm Mark Seale.
- [01:47]
John Cameron Mitchell
And I'm Nathan King.
- [01:48]
Dan
This is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.
- [01:50]
John Cameron Mitchell
The five Families did not want us.
- [01:52]
Dan
To shoot that picture.
- [01:53]
John Cameron Mitchell
This podcast is based on my co host Mark Seals bestselling book of the same title, Leave the Gun, Take the.
- [01:58]
Dan
Cannoli features new and archival interviews with Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, James Caan.
- [02:04]
John Cameron Mitchell
Talia Shire and many others.
- [02:06]
Robert Evans
Yes, that was a real horse's head.
- [02:08]
John Cameron Mitchell
Listen and subscribe to Leave the Gun.
- [02:10]
Dan
Take the Cannoli on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Call Zone Media hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
- [02:44]
Robert Evans
Welcome to It Could Happen Here a Podcast that has been really, really fucking bleak, basically since Trump took office. So instead, instead of doing another episode about how doomed the US Is, we are taking a, I don't know, a field trip to Argentina to talk about something extremely funny. And that extremely funny thing is the Argentinian president Javier Malay promoting a meme coin and maybe going down for it. And with me to talk about this is really the only person I could. I could have on to talk about a crypto thing. Who is Molly White? And try to explain who Molly White is. My explanation of this is in the same way that the great. The great 20th century Marxist theorist C.L.R. james Book Beyond a Boundary is both universally considered to be the best book ever written about cricket. And also literally calling it the thing that it is the best book ever written about cricket is like a damning insult to. To how good the actual book is. Molly is like, probably the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter. Citation Needed also does Web3 is going great, which is amazing. Everyone should go listen to it. And Molly, welcome to the show.
- [03:52]
Molly White
Thanks for having me. What an intro.
- [03:54]
Robert Evans
I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one for such a long time. Great book, by the way, which everyone should both go subscribe to. Citation needed. And also go read beyond the Boundary, because it's great. So, God, we were talking about this before the show. I had planned this episode out before Elon Musk showed up at CPAC with Javier Malay, like, with Malay's signature chainsaw doing, like, doing an even weirder version of Malays thinking about, like, cutting regulation with a chainsaw. But Jesus Christ.
- [04:27]
Molly White
Yeah, what a spectacle that was.
- [04:30]
Robert Evans
Oh, my God. I like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there. That was only, like, day one.
- [04:39]
Molly White
Well, that's overdone now. You know, everyone's doing it. You have to do something new.
- [04:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah. You have to get to wander around the stage with a chainsaw. Like, he didn't even do the Malay thing, which is you have. You have like, a book of regulations or whatever, and you cut it with a chainsaw.
- [04:54]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [04:55]
Robert Evans
Oh, God. So I. I am very excited to talk about the crypto scandal that might finally bring this administration down. However, and I. I am deeply sorry. I. I already. I apologize before this recording started. I am deeply sorry. In order to explain who Javier Malay is, I have to do the single most difficult thing I've ever attempted in my, like, not just in my, like, my history as a podcaster. Like, that's Obviously, trivially true. Like my entire history doing theoretical work in general, which is. I am about to attempt to explain parodism in under 10 minutes on four hours of sleep.
- [05:30]
Molly White
Let's see it.
- [05:31]
Nathan King
So.
- [05:34]
Robert Evans
Here we fudge it. Go. Because, because to get a sense of why, you know, why we have to do this, right? Like, Milei is able to take power, like, basically because he, he's like one of the first candidates in a long time to, in Argentina to run as an anti Peronist. And that may seem weird because. Hold on, wait. Shouldn't there always be like, okay, if you have an ideology, shouldn't the person from like either the left or right side of the political spectrum, you know, be running against an ideology and. No, no. Up until basically now, both the left and the right in Argentina were both Peronists. So to get an understanding of what Peronism is, we need to go back not just to who Juan Peron is, and we'll get to who Juan Peron who's like the guy this ideology is named after. And you know, the ideology is based on like this guy returning from exile from the military coups, but we have to go back to one of the sort of foundational parts of, of the modern Argentinian state. And that element is the fact that Argentina has one of those militant workers movements in the entire world and has had it for about a century. Um, I was on Margaret's show. It could happen here. Jesus Christ. Not. It could happen here. Good Lord. You tell him on four hours.
- [06:48]
Molly White
You're doing great.
- [06:49]
Robert Evans
Thank you, thank you. I haven't even gotten. We. We have not gotten to my final analysis of Peronism, where the closest thing I can compare it to is post short cultural revolution, 1970s era China. So this is about to get so much more unhitched. But a while back I was on Margaret's show, Cool people who did cool stuff to talk about the second Argentinian giant anarcho syndicalist uprising in about a span of four years, which was the giant anarchist rebellion in Patagonia in 1921. 1922. And this is the second one because the first one was the 1919 General Strike, which ends in an event called the Tragic Week, where everyone sort of gets killed by the military. But, you know, the fact that there's. There's two in different parts of the country, enormous anarcho syndicalist uprisings in a span of about 4 years is a demonstration of the fact that this is one of the most militant working classes in the world. And Any political movement that is trying to hold power in this country is going to have to deal with the fact that the Argentinian working class at any moment can, you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake up one day and there's a black flag flying over your factories because your workers have seized it. And the sort of culmination of this, and the reason this is even still relevant today, is that like the last of what you would, I guess you could call like the classical 20th century revolution. So a line of uprising started with like the original formation of the workers councils in Russia in 1905, you know, and that continues to, like the occupation of the factories in Italy through the two red years in like 1918, 1919, like the anarchist parts of the Spanish revolution, like the revolutions in Hungaria and Alger, like, you know, all, like through 68, like the factory occupations in France and Italy. And like, all this whole, this whole lineage of like the thing that happens when you do revolution is workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of the country. The last one of those ever was in Argentina in 2001. Like everywhere else in the world, this shit was gone. And then randomly In Argentina in 2001, like, there's a giant one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really put down by a sort of left Peronist government agreeing to like, tell the IMF to fuck off, which was like, you know, a sort of seismic change in the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, okay, if you were a capitalist in Argentina and you have to deal with this, like, what? What do you do? And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism under the single banner of Argentinian nationalist class collaboration. Which is the thing that makes no sense. But you have to understand, like, Paronism is. Oh God, Protism is simply the weirdest ideology ever. I promise we are going to get to the fun crypto stuff, but we have to unfortunately do this. We have to do our homework first. And part of this is so Juan Peron, the actual guy who his ideology is based off of, is an enormously popular president in like the late 40s and 50s until he gets overthrown by military coup. And to get a sense of again, like, how weird this guy is. Like, this is a guy who, when he comes into power, a bunch of the most famous Nazi war criminals. And like, not just, you know, obviously like, like the famous Nazis fleet Argentina. There's a whole meme about that, right But I mean, we're talking like guys from the Ustazi, like, guys, guys who literally did the holocaust by hand, like flee to Argentina during his administration and when a military coup overthrows him, they flee the country. So again, like the US backed military junta is less pro Nazi than this guy is. He is also personal friends with Che Guevara and considers like the Cuban revolution to be like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply, deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this is that, okay, so you have a military dictatorship through like the 50s and the 60s, right? And like the entire time this dictatorship, not the entire time, but most of the time this dictatorship is happening, right? The entire political spectrum sort of projects all of their political energy onto. We want Peron back. Because Peron is remembered as like the guy who like brought workers rights to the country and also like gave women the right to vote and also is remembered as like a stable nationalist, right wing government by the right. So like, everyone on like both sides of political spectrum project all of their political aspirations into the single figure of Peron, which works because he's not in the country. He's not, not there. So, you know, and because he's gone, you can project anything you want onto him. And this is to a large extent the origin of modern populism, right? Like the, you know, like modern populism is the projection of all grievances onto one guy and then having that guy come in, take power, do constant sort of semi political mobilization to like fix your issues. And one of the interesting threads here is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is very specifically Peronism. Because one of the theoreticians of like modern left populism, one of the most famous ones is my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher Ernesto Lecloud, and his wife Chantel Bouff, who were like, they were like, you know, these, these people were like the theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left in the sort of Euro Communism era. And even up until like, like podemos in Spain, 2011. Like, these are the people who are the theoretical force behind so much like left electoral stuff in the last like 50 years. And it's all from Lecloud, who was a, who was a left Peronist. So all, all of, all the dots are going on the pin board. And while he's gone, he's this guy that like, from an American perspective, it's like imagine that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from 2016 were both the same guy and both Sides were just trying to get this one guy to come back to Argentina and like fix everything. So this creates like the left and right Peronists. And when Peron comes back in the 70s and like immediately gets elected president again, the right Peronist just, I mean, she literally starts slaughtering the left Peronist in the streets. And Peron like backs the right Peronists against the left. And you would think this would destroy left Peronism, but no, no, Left Peronism was in power in Argentina until like Malay's election, like a few years. It's so okay, so like, why would you still be a Left Peronus after Peron like had all your boys machine guns in the 70s? Part of the reason this works also is that he dies and his wife takes power and there's like another military coup. So, you know, he hasn't, he's not like in power long enough kind of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's just, he's in power just long enough for people to remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And at this point I can finally attempt to go, what is Peronis? After like how many minutes of like, oh God, I think I've gone over my 10 minute limit of what is Peronism? But okay, Peron's deal is this, right? Like, so, okay, like if you're a pronus, right, in a Peronist state, everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of the Argentinian state. And so if you're a leftist, you focus on the everyone is going to be equal part. And this means on the one hand, you know, there are, there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working class that they didn't get under the, you know, the sort of previous administrations and under the junta, right. You know, you have like massive expansions of workers rights, nationalizations of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have this like strategy of national development through like import substitution. There's, there's like a long strain of like feminist Peronism from, you know, his like, like him, him being the administration where women got the right to vote. On the other hand, if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before the power of the Argentinian state part, which means like permanent class collaboration. And this, this is the part of the deal that brings the right in is like the deal is that, okay, so you give the workers all this stuff and you really complicated patronage networks and you know, people have jobs and like they have a social safety net at least in theory. And the trade off is you will never ever again attempt to like occupy a factory or like drive these parasites who run your entire life out of power. And the second part of that is this like this hardline, unhinged right wing, like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against, for example, like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I promise the comparison to the, to the long culture, 70s, long culture revolution, we've reached that point of it. So to understand like really what this is, right, it's an active counterinsurgency that is sort of. That is waged by the state and waged by a bunch of like, parts of the social sector to enfold this really dynamic and militant workers movement into the state in such a way that there can still be politics kind of, but it won't actually be a threat to the ruling class. And my sort of like closest thing to this is this very, very weird period in Chinese history between the end of the short culture revolution in 1969 and the death of Mao in 76, where the most unhinged parts of the Cultural Revolution are sort of over because Mao has set off. So 1967, Mao sets off this uprising in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his strategy to gain power of the party. The problem is that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. Like, like the workers take the city. And this is a disaster because they've all been reading about the Paris Commun. I think about the Paris Communist that they had like direct elections of people. And there's a moment actually, like I found this, this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to Joe Enlai and Joe Enlai is like, if we let these people do direct elections, like it's going to lead to anarchism. And Mao is like, oh shit, we have to stop this. So what happens is that he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student Red Guards and some like, loyal, like rebel workers factions, along with a bunch of like the remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition comprised of everyone on every side of the Cultural Revolution, right? Like normally the Culture Revolution is broken down into very roughly, there are rebel factions and there are like government factions, right? And he's, he's pulled together a coalition of a bunch of elements of both of them with the explicit thing of we are going to end the revolution. And in the short run, what the, what this does is it leads to the back half of the Cultural Revolution that people don't talk about very much, which is instead of, like, everyone dying because there are rebels running around. Everyone's dying because the state is killing everyone to, like, bring everyone back under control. And that's what, like, most of the people who die in the Cultural Revolution are killed. Putting the whole thing down. If you want to try to understand, like, what Peronism is, right? It's this ideology of bringing together all of the different sort of disparate political factions in. In a moment, right? You're bringing together everyone from, like, the fascist on the right to, like, the socialists on the left, and you're bringing them into the banner of this one guy in the same. And the reason Mao is able to do this is because, like, he's Mao, right? Every single, like, faction on every side of the Cultural Revolution, whatever they're trying to do is justifying it in the name of, like, oh, this is what Mao wants. This is what Peron is doing, right? He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away from, like, the junta and forge this permanent political coalition. And this results in, like, like, the sort of total dominance that this ideology has of Roger D. And politics means that, like, basically every election in Argentina until, like, Malay takes power is an election between the left and the right Peronists and. Okay, okay, I am so sorry. This finally is the end of my attempt to explain Peronism. And we're gonna go to ads. When we come back, I'm gonna actually do this interview that I've been promising. I am so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much for surviving this. This sort of brings us to, like, how he kind of takes power and how, you know, there's an economic crisis, there's, like, all this inflation. And so he comes in on, like, I don't know, we were talking about this beforehand, and we want to talk to you about this. Like, there's all these really weird parallels between this and the American election where it's like. Except. Except the inflation in Argentina is, like, real.
- [18:43]
Molly White
Yeah, we just have this sort of, like, boogeyman version of it. They actually have hyperinflation.
- [18:50]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [18:51]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [18:51]
Robert Evans
Hold on. Let me check the current inflation rate. Yeah, I think. I mean, it's like several hundred percent right now. I think it's like 300 something percent, which is actually Malay's entire thing was that he was going to stop inflation. It's actually. It's way worse under him than it was under the previous Paronis administration. Oh, there's one last thing I forgot to mention, which Is like, you know, why if you're on the left, would you take this deal? And this also ties into like how this politics, how his politics, like took over the state, which is that like, you know, there were people in Argentina, like under these Peronist governments got things that are like unimaginable here. Like, there's one that's important to me and like, obviously, like, it's still, you're still living under capitalism. A lot of it still sucks, but like, one of the things that people won under these governments was this mandate that 1% of all government employees had to be trans, which is like unimaginable here. Like, like even at the height of like, you know, like sort of trans acceptance or whatever, like, that's, there's what, like that's, that's not, that's not a thing that's even like, no one even like thinks to ask about that. And like, yeah, like, I don't know, like, yeah, like I, I might sell my soul to Juan Peron if it meant that like none of my trans friends ever had to sleep in an alley again. Like, I, you know, but the wheels fall off of this and they put the self described and narco capitalists in power, which is, which is great. And. Oh God. Okay, and this finally gets us to the fun part of this. I said at the top of this episode that like he did a meme coin, right? Can you explain what that is? Because.
- [20:25]
Molly White
Oh God, yeah. So meme coins are a particularly weird part of the cryptocurrency world where they basically go out and say that this is a token that has no inherent value, which, I mean, you know, skeptics would argue that that's true of all cryptocurrency, but. But meme coins very actively embrace that fact. And they're often themed around a meme. So, you know, a lot of people know of dogecoin, which is themed about the, you know, around the Shiba Inu dog. They're also sometimes just themed around sort of an idea or a person or, you know, just sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any given moment. And the idea is that you buy in and all of the attention causes more people to buy in. And if you're really good at it or really lucky, you're one of the first people to buy in. And so you buy in at a low price and then you sell after everyone else has bought in and pump the price up higher. That's the idea. In reality, it doesn't really work that way. It's full of insider trading and market manipulation. And it's not sort of a fair game where anyone has a chance to be one of those early people. But that's sort of the shape of it, at least. And so I guess that brings us to Libra, which is the meme coin that Milei was convinced, I guess, to endorse.
- [21:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I mean, I think this is interesting thing here too, where it's like, our government is just like a fucking meme coin now. Like, the thing that is in control of the American state is doge, the power to government efficiency, which is just the dogecoin meme.
- [21:54]
Molly White
Like, I. Yeah, we're in sort of a post ironic world at this point, where crypto and the US Government are somehow completely intertwined. And I guess we should probably mention that just before Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin, which was the Trump token, followed very shortly after by his wife launching the Melania token. And they did what all good meme coins do, which is that they spiked in price based on the original interest, and then they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price came back down. Because with meme coins, people lose interest and move on to the next one. And, you know, the Trump token, shockingly, does not have enduring value. So.
- [22:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah, and like, and that's this interesting thing about it, which is like, okay, this is just a pump and dump scheme.
- [22:40]
Molly White
Yes.
- [22:41]
Robert Evans
Like, it's just securities fraud. Like, I. We have an entire economy based on security. Everyone doing security is fraud, and everyone knows that security is fraud.
- [22:51]
Hayley
I. I don't know.
- [22:52]
Molly White
I mean, it's. It's really cynical. Like, if you actually talk to people who are deep into meme coins, either creating them or trading them, there's this broad acceptance that, like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's. It's totally a scam. People are trying to run off with the money after they launch these tokens. Like, there's all of this market manipulation happening. Average everyday people who are, you know, seeing these stories about people buying in super early and then making $1 million out of thin air. Like, that never happens. Those aren't average people. Those are like, deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge. Like, everyone knows this and openly discusses it, and yet there's still this active participation in it. Because the idea is that, like, okay, sure, it's a scam, but if you get in on the scam early enough, you can be the scammer and you can be the one who profits, and, you know, screw everybody else. So it's like this really deeply rotten, like, cynical world.
- [23:46]
Robert Evans
Yeah. I remember you talked about this on Jamie's show about, like, how just deeply nihilistic it all is.
- [23:53]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [23:53]
Robert Evans
And I think, you know, I mean, it's not even. It used to be you had to do metaphors to draw a direct line between this sort of, like, the nihilism of this shit and, like, the nihilism of putting, like, Malai or, like, putting Trump and Elon, like, in office. But now it's just. I mean, they just do the meme coin.
- [24:13]
Dan
Right.
- [24:14]
Robert Evans
Like, there's no.
- [24:15]
Molly White
Yeah. The mask is, like, fully off of crypto in the meme coin era. I think, like, it's kind of amazing how during the first. The previous crypto boom in, like, 2020 and 2021, there was this phrase that everyone was saying which was wag me. Which was like, we're all going to make it. And the idea was like, we're all going to get rich together. Everyone's going to succeed. And now it's like, they've, like, you never hear that anymore. And now it's like, oh, I will punch you in the face and steal your wallet if I get the moment opportunity. And that is, like, broadly accepted throughout the crypto world.
- [24:46]
Robert Evans
Yeah. You know, and like, that. That is also, like, what Malai has been doing to, like, everyone in Argentina.
- [24:52]
Dan
Right.
- [24:52]
Robert Evans
Like, his. His thing that came in is he. I mean, I got. One of the things I remember from, like, the very first days he was in offices, he's talking about all this stuff about how they were going to take away welfare benefits from anyone who was arrested at a protest.
- [25:03]
Molly White
Yep.
- [25:04]
Robert Evans
And, like, that didn't stop. There's been massive protests, like, basically since the moment he took power. But, you know, like, it's just this really deeply cynical, very explicit thing of, like. Like, pitting, like, everyone in society against each other. Like, you know, like, making this argument to. There's like, a crime thick article about this where it's like they, you know, like, he's very explicitly making this argument that, like, well, okay, if you're. If you're like a private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason you're making no money is because wages are too high in the public sector. It's because taxes are too high, and if taxes and corporations were lower, they would pay you more.
- [25:34]
Molly White
It's like, yeah, no, like, but.
- [25:37]
Robert Evans
But if it fits into this sort of like, pure nihilism of, like, yeah, everyone trying to grift each other and it's.
- [25:42]
Molly White
I mean, it's really recognizable here in the United States too, where it's the same story of like, oh, you're not making enough money because, you know, people are stealing your tax money and it's going to, you know, people who don't deserve it, or it's going to these programs to fund foreign aid instead of people in the United States. Or, you know, it's like very much trying to pit everyone against one another so that you don't notice that the person who's actually taking the money is the guy who launched the meme coin or the people who have the insider information. You know, it's like this very direct, direct mirror of what is happening in society. And yet it's like so obvious.
- [26:18]
Robert Evans
The problem that we have is like, I think people do broadly recognize that like, everyone who's rich got rich by robbing people. But instead of trying to do anything about that, the, the solution that's being posited by these people is like, well, instead of you just being scammed all the time, like, you could be the scam artist, you could be the robber. Yeah, yeah, like that's like the new scam instead of like, you know, because like, organizing is hard, right? And like, attempting to fight these people is really hard. They have all the money, they have all the power, they have the police, the military. And so you get like this shit. On the other hand, sometimes it backfires because these people like, are like all in enough on, on this fucking meme coin shit to like run it. So yeah, let's, let's, let's talk about this specific meme coin. Libra.
- [27:00]
Molly White
Yeah. So it's kind of a weird example of a meme coin because, you know, most meme coins, the idea is like, this has no intrinsic value, this has no purpose. You just gamble on the token price and hope for the best. Libra was ostensibly supposed to actually have some sort of point to it, making it much unlike most of the meme coins. But it was still, you know, basically a meme coin under the hood. But the idea was that like, somehow some of the profits from this Libra token were going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something like that. There is this sort of like social benefit side to it where, which was all very vague and like there was very little detail. Like you, you know, you never really know with these things what, what is actually supposed to happen. But that was the story is that like, this is going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel money to their projects and all this.
- [27:55]
Robert Evans
It almost feels like an older kind of scam. Like it reminds me of like an NFT scam where like, yeah, they'll be like, ah, somewhere in the future we're going to make a game and you're all going to vote. It's like that thing, but they brought it back for one last ride.
- [28:09]
Mark Seale
Right?
- [28:09]
Molly White
It's like the historical like 2020 era crypto scam where it was like, look, we have this beautiful roadmap of all these things we're going to do and we're going to give you gifts and rewards and. And then it's like, okay, but how is it going to work? And they're like, oh, don't worry about it, we'll, we'll tell you later, just give us your money now. And that was kind of the idea with the, the Libra coin. But basically the team behind it had some folks who were involved in something called Tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group of, of tech entrepreneurs with this sort of like blockchain angle to it, who had access to Malay via this sort of project that was happening in Argentina where you could like pay to come to this conference and Malay was going to be there and all this. And so they joined forces with some Meme Coin guys who had a lot of experience launching other Meme Coin projects, including the Melania token, including the Enron token, which was literally launched by someone who purchased the like, trademark rights to the Enron company.
- [29:09]
Robert Evans
I forgot about that.
- [29:10]
Molly White
Oh yeah, yeah, that came back to haunt us. And so they all joined forces and launched this Meme Coin and they were able to get President Milei to promote the Meme Coin on his Twitter account by saying, like, here's this Libra project, it's going to support Argentinian entrepreneurs. Here's the contract address buy in. And so everyone got super excited because a president had just endorsed a Meme Coin and he unfortunately was too slow to be the first president to do such a thing with Trump beating him to that particular record.
- [29:44]
Robert Evans
But I actually, I actually can't believe blanking on his name. The guy in El Salvador hadn't pulled one yet.
- [29:50]
Molly White
Oh yeah, but Kelly.
- [29:52]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I'm like stunned he hadn't done it yet.
- [29:55]
Molly White
Yeah, it's probably because he's a real bitcoiner and bitcoin maximalists are not a huge fan of any other cryptocurrencies. That would be my guess. But yeah, it is a little surprising.
- [30:05]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Oh, also, okay, there's another unhinged angle here which I want to briefly mention because it's extremely Funny. Although my good friends Julie pointed me to. Which is part of the thing that's like, originally. That originally made me want to do this, is that. So one of the people who was like, involved in like, this hookup process with, like, the crypto people was this guy named Augustine LaHaye, who's like this very, very famous conservative writer. And he's the guy who, like, introduced the concept of gender ideology to Argentina. So he's like one of. One of his, like, big things is like, being a turf all the time. Right. And the guy who, like, got all of these people into turf shit is like the guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scam. And he might have to sell him out in order to get out of the crypto scam, which is just. Oh, God, trans people getting our revenge.
- [30:52]
Molly White
You love to see it.
- [30:54]
Robert Evans
Speaking of crypto scams, we should take one more ad break before we get into all of the rest of this bullshit. All right, we are back to the main story of the really unprecedented access this administration has given the crypto people. Can you talk a bit about, like, who the, like, who the people involved in this are? Because it's a lot of, like, very, very large, like, players in this world.
- [31:28]
Molly White
Yeah. So, I mean, it's still sort of coming out like who exactly was involved and to what degree they were involved. But it's really starting to look like the creation of this meme coin was spearheaded by a bunch of guys at a group called Kelsier Ventures that has been involved in, like I said, launching a bunch of these tokens. And that's sort of a family run operation. There's the guy named Dr. Tom and then his two sons. Sons, Hayden and Gideon, I believe. The other ones named Kitty.
- [31:59]
Robert Evans
Jesus Christ.
- [32:01]
Molly White
Like, oh, no.
- [32:03]
Robert Evans
They're making these guys in a lab.
- [32:07]
Molly White
And, you know, they're kind of young guys. Like, Hayden is like 28 or something like that, which is, you know, typical for the crypto world, I guess. But yeah, and. And so Hayden Davis is the mastermind behind much of the launch, but they're working very closely with a bunch of other people in the crypto world. And that's something that they sort of to do with these big splashy token launches. You know, the Trump Token had to do this as well, where you can't just show up as like a president and launch a meme coin and expect everything will just work. Because when that many people all try to buy a token at once, you know, you need someone on the other end to actually be selling the tokens. And you know, there's all of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches and so you need people to do the market making and there's the liquidity providers and there's all these, you know, projects under the hood that are, that are involved. And it's beginning to look like a lot of those people were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that was perhaps not entirely proper. Yeah, I know propriety around meme coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but you know, there's sort of talks about how one of the co founders of a project called Meteora, which is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a place where people are actually buying these tokens.
- [33:26]
Robert Evans
Can you explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners?
- [33:30]
Molly White
Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's basically sort of what I, what I suggested, which is that like if you go out and launch a token and you don't do any prep, when someone goes to buy that token, there's, or sell that token, there's, there's no one on the other side of that trade. You need some amount of liquidity in the markets when you start off.
- [33:49]
Nathan King
Yeah.
- [33:49]
Robert Evans
So like there, there, there have to be like, there have to be like actual tokens that you can sell to people. Just.
- [33:53]
Molly White
Yeah. And, and if someone, you know, if someone buys one of your tokens, they want to be able to sell it to someone as well. And so you need to be able to sort of absorb that kind of trading without just assuming that, you know, out of thin air these people will exist on both sides of the trade. And so there are these projects called liquidity providers where you know, sometimes it's like big firms will provide liquidity and they'll step in, in that role. And, and that's sort of the market maker end of things. Meteora is a little bit unusual in that they do like decentralized liquidity provision, which I'm not going to go into too much detail about because it's very mind numbing.
- [34:29]
Robert Evans
But it's also so funny that like the terms that have taken hold for these things, like, are financial terms. And it's like, yeah, it's like, like this is not liquidity in the sense of like, does the US government have cash on hand to pay something? This is like, are there these like stupid little weird program things to like move other programs around?
- [34:49]
Molly White
Yeah, and it's not even dollars. You know, we're not, we're not talking about real dollars here. We're talking about like people providing you One fake token in exchange for another fake token. But I think they very much intentionally use the traditional financial terms to sort of lend a degree of legitimacy to it and cover up the fact that like, oh, and if you're a liquidity provider and you just like siphon all the liquidity out of there, you've just made a ton of money in a total scam. But it sounds legit because it's a liquidity provider and it's, it's something that exists in like traditional finance. But yeah, so, so there's this Meteora project where that liquidity operation all happens. And you know, Meteora was deeply sort of involved in some of these big token launches. Like Trump Token was starting out on Meteora, Melania started out there, this Libra Token started out there. And now it seems like the co founder was like very closely connected to this Hayden guy. He, he even supposedly introduced the Melania team to Hayden Davis, the God, the Kelsier guy. Sounds like, you know, according to some of the allegations out there, he was personally involved in a lot of this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into when it comes to Libra Token and why everything went so wrong. And it seems like there is this sort of network of people throughout this meme coin world who are running these big platforms and who are making connections and all of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of these big token launches. So that when those people who are buying it up early and making all this money, it's like, oh yeah, that's the guy who runs Meteora. This happens so much in the crypto world and I should stop being surprised every time it happens. But what happened is when the co founder of Meteora stepped down, the other co founder who was like previously not really known, stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co founder. And he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow, the co founder who stepped down was, you know, he thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing shady was happening at Meteora, etc. The other co founder who just like came out of the woodwork, he runs Jupiter, which is the other. It's like the ostensible meteoric competitor. It's like, oh yeah, it's all just the same people, you know, behind the scenes. And you know, some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on this were saying, oh yeah, the Jupiter guys were all insider trading too. The Meteora guys are insider trading. Like they're all trading against you. So it's really exposed A lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world, in all of this infrastructure, and the fact that, like. Oh, yeah, yeah. When you're buying meme coins, like you are playing in a rigged casino.
- [37:27]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [37:27]
Molly White
Which has certainly not done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly also to Malays as well.
- [37:33]
Robert Evans
Yes. Let's get into, like, Malay's involvement in this. Can you give you layups for the timeline of this? Because it's so funny.
- [37:40]
Molly White
Yeah, it's a little wild. So unlike the Trump Token, Melee did not launch this token. He was not the. The mastermind behind it. It's not clear how much he really knew about the team behind it or what they were doing, but he was certainly convinced to endorse this token and, you know, pump it up on Twitter and all of this. And again, this is not an unusual thing for meme coins to do. I mean, it's unusual for them to find a president, but apparently not now. Like, I. That's true. It was unusual for them to find a president, but, you know, there's this whole process with meme coins where they try to find influential people to talk about them, to drive the interest in the token. And so they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in the crypto world or, you know, anyone with some degree of a platform to promote a token. And ostensibly they're supposed to disclose that they are being paid to promote the token. They rarely do.
- [38:42]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [38:43]
Molly White
It is technically illegal, but, like, rarely, rarely enforced for. For someone to promote a token without disclosure. One of the very few cases where it was enforced was against Kim Kardashian, of all people.
- [38:57]
Robert Evans
Although that. That shit's all gone now.
- [38:59]
Molly White
Yeah. And that was years ago before the SEC was bought by the crypto companies. And so. Yeah.
- [39:04]
Robert Evans
And like, I mean, they literally, like, like, yesterday it was at this. Yeah. Was it yesterday, as we're recording this. Recording this on Friday. Was it yesterday that the. The. Is it the sec. The SEC that dropped the case against Coinbase?
- [39:17]
Molly White
Sec. That was today? Yeah, this morning.
- [39:20]
Robert Evans
Today. Oh, my God. Yeah.
- [39:22]
Molly White
Yeah. And I mean, we're seeing this everywhere, but the SEC has paused a case against Binance which had involved allegations of actual fraud, not just the sort of, like, minor securities law violations. Fraud is also actually a securities law violation.
- [39:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah, Those are all, by the way, a bunch of like, very, very, like. Like, bianc and like, Coinbase are like, the biggest players in, like, the regular crypto market.
- [39:43]
Molly White
Yeah. Binance is the biggest cryptocurrency exc in the world. Coinbase is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. Coinbase spent over $75 million on the most recent political cycle in the US and now is reaping the rewards by having the SEC case against them dropped. So I would not expect much in the way of SEC enforcement against crypto founders or companies.
- [40:07]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [40:08]
Molly White
Especially given that they have also installed crypto friendly people at the sec. At the cftc. The CFTC nominee for chair is an Andreessen Horowitz guy who is advising them on crypto policy like it's totally rotten now.
- [40:22]
Robert Evans
Yeah, well, and also like the actual guy running the government right now is Elon Musk, who is, you know, like one of their fucking boys.
- [40:30]
Molly White
Yeah. And the guy who's ostensibly running the project has his own meme coin project. So I suspect he's not going to be super keen on anyone enforcing laws against meme coin operations either. Yeah.
- [40:41]
Robert Evans
Good God, is such a mess. Yeah. All right, back to Argentina.
- [40:46]
Molly White
Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair.
- [40:49]
Robert Evans
Oh God.
- [40:51]
Molly White
Yeah. So, so basically, you know, the, the coin launches me, you know, fires off a tweet about how this is such a great meme coin and, you know, he, he gives the token address so you can all go buy it. And then very early on it becomes clear that there is some degree of insider trading happening. So, you know, the beauty and the horror of crypto is that it's all recorded on a public blockchain. People can look at who is doing the early trades in these tokens and it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the wallets that are, that were involved in launching the token, and so the ones that are being controlled by the people who, you know, actually created this token and are promoting it, are also involved in this early sniping of the token. And sniping is when you use crypto trading bots, you know, like automated programs to buy up the tokens very early on at low, low, low prices, you know, earlier than any human could reasonably be expected to go. But hit the buy button.
- [41:57]
Robert Evans
Yeah, it's the thing that like fucking ticket scalpers do. Or like, like the reason why you can't buy a PS5 is that all these trading bots get in like immediately.
- [42:05]
Molly White
Exactly. It's 100% analogous to that. But in the case of these trading bots, you know, often they have insider information. They have the contract address before it's public so that they can be like split second on it to buy these tokens early, and then they usually dump them really early too. So you Know, if. If Melee tweets about a meme coin, the price shoots up within minutes of this thing launching. And within minutes, these snipers sell off and they make millions of dollars, often in profits. And it is that selling that often causes the price to crash right back down again, causing those average people who thought that they were early to be the ones basically subsidizing the folks who make millions of dollars off these launches.
- [42:49]
Robert Evans
Yeah, like, it's pump a dump. It's literally just a puppet dump. Like, it's just fraud. Like, I just.
- [42:54]
Molly White
Right.
- [42:55]
Robert Evans
I. I don't know. Like, I just. This is by my, like, old, like, 2010 sense of ethics emerging here, which apparently doesn't exist in the sort of bold new world of, like, ni. Like, this is just fraud.
- [43:08]
Molly White
Yeah, no, I know. And, like, people talk about, you know, oh, we need crypto regulations. Like, you don't need any new regulations. Fraud is still fraud. Like, stealing from people is illegal, but that's like a whole separate point, this entire thing.
- [43:21]
Robert Evans
When everyone was doing this on Wall street, it, like, crashed the economy a bunch of times. We were like, holy shit, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to do this. But I don't know. Capitalism is such that you could just buy the government. And now all your. All your, like, fraud schemes are legal, right?
- [43:34]
Molly White
If you do it on the blockchain, crime is legal, apparently.
- [43:36]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [43:37]
Molly White
But, yeah, so, you know, there's this. There's this really early scandal where it's like, oh, you know, insiders are trading this token. Everyone's calling it a rug pull, because that's like the colloquial term for when someone launches a project and then steals all the money. And it certainly looks like that's what's happening. And so Melee very quickly distances himself from the project. He deletes the tweet that he made, and he sends out a new tweet saying, basically, I didn't know anything about these guys. I don't really know what their project is. I just thought it was this, you know, cool thing that was going to support Argentinean businesses. I, you know, I renounced all affiliation with it, basically. And then he, of course, like, blames his political opponents for trying to weaponize this against him. And, you know, he goes very much out swinging on. On people being like, I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to come after my reputation.
- [44:30]
Robert Evans
The parodists made me do it.
- [44:33]
Molly White
Right, exactly. He's like, this is all your fault somehow. So anyway, you know, that all happens, and it Sort of launches the project into chaos because the way that the people on the inside are talking about it and huge grain of salt here because, you know, these are people who are potentially admitting to their crimes.
- [44:53]
Robert Evans
Well, it also, like, these are professional liars. Like their job is to lie to people for a living. Like it's.
- [44:59]
Molly White
And yeah, and several of the things that they've said have already been proven to be untrue. So like huge, huge, huge grain of salt here. But their story, story is that, oh, we were sniping the token. Yes. But it's not bad because we were doing it to try to protect people from the other token snipers who show up on, on launches like this. Like, we did it.
- [45:21]
Robert Evans
No, no, you don't understand. We had, we had to do the scam to save you from the other people who were trying to do the same scam.
- [45:26]
Molly White
You're not even exaggerating. That's literally what they said.
- [45:30]
Robert Evans
That's so good.
- [45:32]
Molly White
And so they come up with this like hair brain theory where they're like, okay, if we snipe the tokens early, we can stop other token snipers from accumulating these huge piles of the tokens and then dumping them and causing the whole thing to crash. And so, you know, they will be limited to sniping smaller quantities that won't totally wreck the whole, you know, chart basically and cause it to go to zero. And then we'll take our accumulated pile of tokens and like slowly seed it back in to, to try to stabilize the char. I mean it's like blatant manipulate, market manipulation that they're describing. Like in defending themselves against allegations that they're committing crimes, they're admitting to new crimes. It's like this whole thing, but that's the story is that they were like, we had to do this to protect the chart. And the idea was that like Melee was going to make this video promoting the token even more. And at that point they were going to put all this money that they had taken back into the project. But of course that video never came because Milei had already cut his losses and was like, I don't want anything to do with this. And so now the guys who launched this token are sitting on like ostensibly $100 million worth of tokens. I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the numbers aren't real. And you know, there's really not $100 million floating around in there. Yeah, people, again, people talk about how this is like a 4.5 billion dollar crypto scam. There was never 4.5 billion dollars in this. It's all fake money. But like the. It is true that there were people who put real money into this. They got totally scammed, basically taken for a ride because they thought that they might be able to make money on it because the President endorsed it because they thought there was this, you know, somewhat legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses. They lost their money and it all went to this guy, Hayden Williams, who is, is, you know, connected to Melee, who has some degree of influence with Melee, who claimed in text messages that he controls Melee.
- [47:32]
Robert Evans
Oh my God. Yeah, by the way. Use the N word, by the way. In these two, you have to like who these people are. Like, this is, this is, this is a white guy using the N word.
- [47:42]
Molly White
Like, yeah, this guy is like whiter than I am. And using the N word to say that. Jesus Christ, not great. He said this text message that was leaked that he was sending money to Milei's sister, who is very influential and who sort of is Milei's right hand sister, you know, sent money to her and that as a result of that, Milei will do anything that I want. He'll say what I want, he'll tweet what I want, he'll, you know, he's my puppet, basically. Of course, Milei was very unhappy about this characterization, but it seems like there's money trading hands behind the scenes, even though Milei was not, not, you know, behind the token directly. And you know, this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal for me Lay, which is both surprising that like, of all things that could have caused a political scandal for me Lay, there are so many things to choose from and this is what it was. But you know, he's now facing these, these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud, that he should be impeached even, you know, there's some rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some sort of impeachment proceedings against him. And it's all gone very south very quickly for him, I think.
- [48:51]
Robert Evans
God, it really would be so incredibly funny if this is the thing that brings him down. I don't know if it will. But also like, I don't know, this is one of these, like in an even bigger way than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political fucking godsend, like handed down to the opposition. And the Democrats are. Don't use it. Right, because, you know, they're the Democrats.
- [49:13]
Nathan King
Right.
- [49:13]
Robert Evans
Instead of just like doing, instead of doing the thing I would do, which is starting literally every speech with fucking no cops, no kings, no crashes. They're like, they're like, no, we're not doing anything. But like, this is like, if you were like a Catholic opponent of this administration, like, this is like fucking God, like reaching a giant handout and going, hey, have this thing to beat him. Like, have this stick to beat him over the head with.
- [49:34]
Molly White
Yeah. And you know, to their credit, I feel like Argentinian politicians are taking better advantage of this than us politicians have taken of their many opportunities because they are calling for, you know, impeachment. There have been, you know, many lawsuits filed against me Lay. And you know, there is a judge looking into his degree of connections here. Obviously there is, you know, some amount of corruption over in the Argentinian government. And so, you know, the, the degree to which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat questionable, let's just say. Yeah, and you know, the, the likelihood of an impeachment proceeding actually, you know, getting the votes to go to trial is, is certainly questionable. But this has been used, you know, in a somewhat effective way to attack the credibility of Melee, which is, you know, worth doing, I think.
- [50:24]
Robert Evans
And you know, I'll say this about Peronism, right? Like, the thing, the thing about Peronism is that it's like the engine that devours social movements, right. Like anytime a social movement comes in, the protists sort of like, like consume it from the inside. But the thing, the thing about the way that like bro doesn't functions is like, okay, so they, they've, they've eaten all these social movements, but it's not quite like the US where you can just like disband it and make it go away. Like you actually have to still have. Have the thing the social movement does. And that means that these motherfuckers can throw a protest. Like what, what. Whatever else you say about the Proteas, they aren't capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets. And I'm, I'm really interested to see what's going to happen like this weekend and over the coming weeks to see if we see another 17th giant round of protests. Like also specifically about this.
- [51:10]
Molly White
Yeah, yeah, I'll be curious too. It's really interesting to me, like, to what degree this resonates with everyday people, I guess in Argentina because, you know, there's, there's a lot to complain about with the Melee government. And so, you know, it's sort of fascinating to me that people are latching on to this and you know, it's Sort of interesting just to compare with the United States, where there's a lot to complain about with the Trump administration. And, you know, people were complaining about the meme coin, but by the time that was, you know, partly because it was pre inauguration and so Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders. And so it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration. And so it didn't get that much traction in sort of the longer term. So it's interesting to me to watch this play out in a different country where, you know, Milei has been in office for some time now and, you know, this has gained at least some degree of a foothold and I'll, I'll be curious to see, you know, if that endures or not. He's, he is sort of trying to play it off as like, you know, oh, everyone knows crypto is risky. He said something, he, he tried to do this like, damage control interview on TV where he said that basically like, the people who bought this token knew they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet, which is a wild thing to say. Yeah, that's just a nutty thing to say, but also very in character for him. And you know, he, he said something in that interview to the effect of like, you know, only a couple thousand people lost money. What's the chances that those people were even Argentinian? Like, we shouldn't even care if they were, you know, not Argentinian. And so, you know, it's, it's sort of interesting to watch him try to downplay this. It's like, well, yeah, of course people lost money. It's a scam, you know. Yeah, I guess.
- [53:08]
Robert Evans
I think part of the reason this is like a real issue for him is that like he really truly, you know, and this is something that like Trump is also doing this. Like, he, but he, he like really truly went out to like his main base of supporters and was like, I'm just going to take you up behind a woods and shoot you and like take the money out of your pocket. And like the way he's like systematically fucking all of the people who are supposed to be his political base. And like, like Trump was also doing this, but like, people sort of like, haven't isn't set in that this is what's happening. Whereas like this rug pull thing, it's like this is like the only thing that the fucking unhinged right wing crypto, bro, people care about. Like, this is like the one thing you could possibly do to, like, piss them off.
- [53:49]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [53:50]
Molly White
But it's really interesting to see, like, what causes crypto people to turn on you, because it did happen in a much more limited way with Trump, where, you know, the US Crypto movement, I guess that's not the right word for it, but the industry or the crypto world had really supported Trump very heavily, and, you know, they had donated to him. But there was also this widespread belief among people who traded crypto that Trump was going to be good for crypto. He was going to cause crypto prices to go up, he was going to. To fix all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry back and all this stuff. And then when Trump came out and launched a meme coin, some of his most devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it. And they. They really responded in a way that I think a lot of people didn't expect, which was like, I can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin. He's supposed to believe in crypto, not just use it to steal money from his supporters. And so, like, there was actually this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto world in the US as well. And so I think that's, you know, sort of interesting to see is that, like, okay, you're allowed to do scams and, you know, run your government in a way that personally benefits you, as long as it's not reflecting poorly on us and it's not taking money from us. But as soon as it starts to make people, you know, look askance at meme coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly.
- [55:15]
Robert Evans
Yeah, I wonder. I don't know. I'm interested in your take on this. How much of that is people who are in less meme coiny things, who are worried about their assets because they, at some point have to be able to cash out.
- [55:30]
Molly White
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. There are factions in crypto where I sort of referred to this earlier when we were talking about bekele, but, you know, there are bitcoiners who believe that bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency and that everything else is a total scam. And so they are really upset when these meme coins come out because they feel like it reflects poorly on bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together. There's sort of a step down from that, which is people who think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin, but meme coins are not them. And so there's been all this talk recently where they're like, look at all these meme coins coin scams that are getting in the news. You know, that there was like the hawk to a meme coin that totally like, yeah, stole a news cycle for a minute there. And they're terrified that, you know, people are starting to think of crypto as meme coins. You know, it's just one in the same. And they're like, people are not going to think of all these wonderful legitimate cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking about hawk to a coin and how they ripped off a bunch of people, which, like, like, personally, I think that the reputation is perhaps somewhat deserved. But, you know, there is this belief among some people that like, oh, this is not real crypto and it's giving the rest of crypto a bad reputation. And we're actually starting to see talk of that in some of the higher places where, you know, I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the hawk to a coin on Capitol Hill, you know, like, when they're talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities fraud odds, the opposition is like, well, do we want hawk to a coin everywhere? Like, is this really what we want? And so it is, you know, affecting the public perception and the perception in, you know, Congress to some extent, which I think is what's really scaring people because they've just made these huge inroads with, you know, all of these now crypto, friendly politicians and friendly regulators. And now crypto is out here making a fool of itself. Right. As, you know, new legislation or regulation might be installed.
- [57:32]
Nathan King
Yeah.
- [57:32]
Robert Evans
And this gets me to, I think the thing I want to close on, which is, you know, like, we actually did successfully as a society kill the nft. Yeah, like we took that motherfucker out back and stabbed it to death. And I'm wondering whether you think that, like, this is. This is a moment where we can like, use this as a wedge thing to try to like, fucking kill this entire industry and how vulnerable they are to like, the negative priority are rattlings from all of this.
- [57:56]
Molly White
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good point. That like, the nft, even as crypto has had a resurgence, you know, bitcoin crossed a hundred thousand dollars, NFTs are like nowhere to be found. You know, like, the NFT platforms are struggling. They're a couple of them just went out of business. And I think it is largely thanks to the fact that NFTs became really cringe. You know, like, everyone was like, oh, those stupid monkey pictures. And that had, like, a really devastating impact on this entire. Was supposed to be like the future of art or whatever. And so I think there is that potential throughout other portions of the crypto world. I would not be shocked to see that happen to these meme coin platforms where they sort of lose their novelty value and people just see them as big scams and there's really no point. But unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or the sort of societal distaste for it. Because, I mean, there are people who have bought bitcoin early who have billions of dollars in crypto in bitcoin. They are now working in the US Government. You know, they have, like, very strong control over very powerful institutions. And so there is this countervailing force to keep crypto alive at basically any cost. Cost.
- [59:20]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [59:21]
Molly White
And I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate to do that as we're seeing calls for, say, a bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up. The idea that, like, the U.S. government should personally stockpile bitcoin, which, you know, they make a couple of arguments as to why they should do that, which are not very convincing even to some of the people in the crypto world. But the sort of underlying thread through it is that if the U.S. government holds a substantial amount of bitcoin, they won't be able to afford. Afford to let the bitcoin price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the cryptocurrency industry. And so I think that's why we're seeing the attempts to, you know, sort of work crypto into government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance, you know, people trying to get Bitcoin ETFs into, you know, your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like that is really to make it so endemic and so contagious, I guess, to the rest of the financial world that, that it's almost like, you know, this. This threat that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right, if you kill us, we'll kill you.
- [60:31]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And I think it's this interesting thing of, like, sorry, I know I said we were going to close out, but, like, no, this is fun. There's this interesting way in which, like, this seems like the end game for the entire, like, tech bubble economy is like, you know, like, none of these fucking companies have ever been able to make money, right? None of these fucking companies, like, they all, they all every like, fucking like everything from like, like fucking Uber to like, fucking like Google and Amazon, like hemorrhaged money. Uber will hemorrhage money until it. Eventually the bubble pops and it dies. Right, but like, Amazon only really started making money. You know, Google was kind of making money, but like Amazon started making money when they started getting government contracts for like their cloud computing shit.
- [61:10]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [61:10]
Robert Evans
And like that like, looks like the end game. Like, you know, this is, this is the thing with like, Elon's like fucking electric armored vehicle contract is like the only thing that can keep the bubble going is just pure state intervention. But that also gives me a little bit of hope because I think the thing that's kept this giant bubble economy going for over a decade and a half now has been really, really, even under the original Trump administration. I mean, the original Trump administration kind of got bailed out by Covid to some extent. I mean, the original Argentinian economic crisis was. There's this huge wave of currency collapses in 2018 where it was sort of contained. Like the IMF did a bailout out in. While I was trying to do a bailout in Argentina. And it like, it kind of got contained, but it set off like a wave uprisings. But like, there's been this, like, really, it's, it's taken this really careful financial management and like all of these like, like, like a trillion dollars of like overnight repo purchases like every day from the treasury to like, make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking, like, industry to, to like, prevent like the kind of like 2008 style collapses. And I, I think it, it take, it's taken a really delicate hand and you know, like, I don't think it's a good thing. But on the other hand, like, these guys just fire the nuke police, like while they were moving a nuke. And I wonder if they can actually keep the dance going or if they're just going to. Or if they're going to fuck up their bubble economy, just blow it all up, which might maybe nuke all of these people in the process.
- [62:33]
Molly White
Maybe. I also think that, you know, if we're talking like accelerationism, I think that one of the most interesting things that we're going to be seeing now is that, that the crypto industry has long argued that they have all this potential. You know, they are just around the corner from reinventing the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular. And the only reason that they haven't, you know, actually made true on that is because of those pesky regulators that are stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want. And so they've spent years now vilifying the regulators, claiming that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators would just let them innovate. Right. And now they've got the regulators. They're in a world where, you know, they basically own the regulators. They're all of the enforcement cases against them are going to go away. You know, the friendliest possible regulations are going to be introduced. And now crypto doesn't have that excuse anymore. Right. They can't just say that the reason we don't do anything useful is because these stupid regulators won't let us lend you Bitcoin or whatever. And so I think, you know, there is going to be this moment where people are like, okay, so go do it now. You know, like, do the innovation now. And it's going to expose a lot of the Popsicle sticks and bubble gum that's holding up this crypto industry, because they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will be interesting. I just hope it doesn't take, like, you know, the economic collapse of a entire country to prove it.
- [64:02]
Robert Evans
Well, my. My line on this is that, like, accelerationism as an ideology doesn't exist anymore because there's not. There's nothing you can do. Do to do the acceleration. Yeah, right, like. Or something like left accelerationism. Like, Trump and Elon Musk, like, just have their foot hammering the pedal all the way down. We are accelerating as fast as we could possibly go, and all we have left is to, like, make sure that the acceleration goes our way and not theirs.
- [64:25]
Molly White
Yeah, yeah, but I. Yeah, I guess, like, you know, it's me trying to find a light in the darkness. You know, it's like, all right, well, I guess at least we might see the crypto industry fall apart.
- [64:38]
Robert Evans
Yeah, well, look, look, they. They might bring down the first anarcho capitalist president, so.
- [64:44]
Molly White
Yeah, that's true.
- [64:46]
Nathan King
Yeah.
- [64:46]
Robert Evans
I don't know. Today Argentina, tomorrow the world.
- [64:49]
Molly White
Yeah, well, and I think also just like, you know, it's interesting to see this uprising and sort of broad distaste for me and everything that he's doing, when everything that he's doing is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump and his affection for Elon Musk. And so. So, you know, to see people sort of turn on, that is perhaps a little bit instructive.
- [65:12]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And I think it's. This is interesting Kind of like bounce back thing too, because he's like, you know, he's. Somebody said he's modeling himself on Trump 1, like the first Trump administration, but he got even weirder with it than like Trump1 did. And now Trump too is like modeling itself back. Yeah. Like slingshotting, but.
- [65:27]
Molly White
And Elon's got the chainsaw.
- [65:29]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And I don't know, hopefully the fucking rebound hits them too and they also get the backlash to it. And we, Yeah, I don't know, we don't all die when they accidentally set a nuke off because we've driven them out of power already.
- [65:42]
Molly White
That would be nice.
- [65:44]
Robert Evans
Yeah. Well, Molly, thank you so much for coming on the show and for talking, talking with us about this unhinged bullshit and also just genuinely thank you. Thank you for reporting on all of this shit because, oh my God, it is not easy. I don't know how you stay sane.
- [66:02]
Molly White
I don't pretend. I. I think that's the secret. You just have to give in to the madness.
- [66:08]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [66:09]
Molly White
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me.
- [66:11]
Robert Evans
Yeah. And where can people find your work?
- [66:13]
Molly White
You can find me at CitationNeeded News. I also run web3is going just great, which is web3is going great.com and then I'm on social media everywhere. You'll find me from either of those websites.
- [66:26]
Robert Evans
Yeah, we'll put links to all of this in the description. Thank you again. And yeah, I don't know, go, go make crypto. So, so uncool that these people have a terrible day in panic.
- [66:35]
Molly White
I'll do my best.
- [66:56]
American Express Representative
With the American Express Gold card, I.
- [66:58]
Molly White
Can earn four times membership rewards points at US Supermarkets.
- [67:01]
American Express Representative
So with all these groceries, I'm also getting points. Learn more@americanexpress.com US Explore Gold Terms and points Cap apply.
- [67:11]
Molly White
Need something to level up while you.
- [67:13]
James Stout
Juggle work and life?
- [67:15]
Molly White
I'm Dr. Amantha Imber, an organizational psychologist.
- [67:18]
Hayley
And the host of the podcast How I Work.
- [67:21]
Molly White
It's a show where I interview some of the world's most successful people who share their unique tactics, routines and strategies for balancing work, family and personal growth. How I Work will give you practical tips to turbocharge your career and your life. Search for How I work on the.
- [67:38]
Hayley
Free Iheart app or in whatever podcast.
- [67:40]
Molly White
App you're listening to.
- [67:45]
James Stout
Hi everyone and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and the people putting them back together. And today, Garrison and I are joined by Hayley and Dan. Both Hayley and Dan are gender affirming care providers in the Northeast. And they both work at federally qualified health centers. Welcome to the show, guys.
- [68:06]
Nathan King
Thank you so much.
- [68:07]
American Express Representative
Thank you.
- [68:09]
James Stout
Okay, so for people who are not familiar, right. Maybe they've been fortunate enough to have like really good healthcare their whole life or fortunate enough to not live in the United States and have this bizarre like web of healthcare provision. Can you explain what a federally qualified healthcare center is?
- [68:27]
Molly White
Sure.
- [68:27]
Nathan King
You mind if I take this one, Haley? So I would start by saying that our industry, our advocacy arms would riot if they assumed that federally qualified health centers weren't good care. Right. So I gotta dismiss with that to start with, right?
- [68:41]
James Stout
Oh yeah, yeah. I guess good is. Yeah, a relative to. Yeah, I've relied on federally qualified healthcare center for a while and it was great. They were very nice. Actually my prescriptions cost a lot less now than they do with my very, very expensive I heart insurance.
- [68:54]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [68:55]
Nathan King
So around the 1960s there was the sort of free clinic movement that got started and what grew out of that became the federally qualified health center system in the United States. So there are roughly 1600 unique federally qualified health centers all over the country. And we, as in sort of, you know, confederated set of health centers all across the country, are responsible for treating those most in need in the United States. So the Medicaid population, those without insurance, we cannot turn anybody away if you do not have insurance. People in rural areas where healthcare is very difficult to access and to get undocumented folks and really everybody in between. At the health center that I work at, we mostly treat folks on Medicaid, which is pretty typical. Although you'll find in states with no Medicaid expansion, it's a lot more uninsured and less Medicaid. But we are the, the nation's safety net healthcare provider. And without us, there are roughly 1 in 10Americans would not get their health care.
- [69:53]
James Stout
Geez. For like, I guess, people who are not in the United States. Do you want to go and give us like a 1 minute speed run of what Medicaid is? Medicare.
- [70:03]
Dan
Sure.
- [70:04]
Nathan King
So America does not have a nationalized insurance program as we are very frustrated with. Most of the time it's mostly commercial insurance that you mostly get through your job. But if you are not. Fortunate is not the right word. But if you're not fortunate enough to get that Medicare. Medicaid is the system that gives health insurance to people who are living at or below the federal poverty line. With the Affordable Care act or the ACA Obamacare, that level raised a little bit. So you could still get Medicaid if you were at above the federal poverty line. But this is mostly for the working poor. That's who gets Medicaid.
- [70:36]
American Express Representative
Cool.
- [70:36]
James Stout
Yeah, it's a great system. Let's talk about how this is funded then. Like you said, the US doesn't have like a single payer healthcare system. So how are these healthcare centers funded right now? Now or maybe how were they funded like six weeks ago?
- [70:50]
Nathan King
Yeah. So most of the work that we do is fee for service. We're not a lot different than a lot of other places in that regard.
- [70:56]
Molly White
Right.
- [70:57]
Nathan King
If you have Medicaid patients, we are a fee for service program. We give provision of care to them on a per visit basis, same as anywhere else in the country. And how that works and we get reimbursed for it. What makes fqs different than everywhere else is two things. One, we get a special rate that is designated because of our willingness to take on these more expensive, more complicated patients. Patients and to ensure they're healthy enough to keep that offensive systems of care like emergency rooms and things of that nature.
- [71:24]
Dan
Yeah.
- [71:24]
Nathan King
And two is that we have a grant called the Fed 330 and this is a sort of like large sort of use it as you need to grant that depending on the agency is anywhere from 5 to 25% of your total annual funds and is meant to cover all of the folks who can't afford care and are uninsured.
- [71:43]
American Express Representative
Part of my funding also I do a lot of work with HIV and HIV prevention. So a lot of my work is done via Ryan White funding. And there's some other kind of separate funding streams that's applicable specifically to gender affirming care. However, it's all kind of messy and tied up in a lot of those other funding streams that Dan mentioned. And there's some specific limitations because of those funding streams. Again historically, because who knows right now? But through something called the Hyde Amendment, it means that our funding would be at jeopardy if we provided abortion care care. So there are some kind of limitations. A lot of what we do as an FQHC is providing really comprehensive, expansive care. We're kind of some of the few clinics that do everything that we do under one roof. But there have been some limitations specifically abortion to that.
- [72:36]
James Stout
Yeah, it's more of a healthcare experience that I'm used to as someone from Europe going to one of these centers than the American one where you get a referral and then yeah, get it approved and blah blah, blah.
- [72:47]
American Express Representative
And like a lot of the ways that I talk to friends who live in other Countries like, feel like my role is kind of more similar to like a GP as a nurse practitioner. There isn't necessarily an equivalent, but I feel like a GP is kind of a very similar universal way to understand a lot of what I do.
- [73:03]
James Stout
Yeah, that makes sense. So can you explain Ryan White funding? Like, where does that come from? Why is it called Ryan White?
- [73:10]
American Express Representative
So basically, Ryan White funding was initiated in, I believe, the early 90s during the AIDS crisis and was a large government initiative. It's named after Ryan White, who was a patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion. So Ryan White funding right now is a major source for funding things like PrEP, which is medication for prevention for HIV as well as direct HIV treatment.
- [73:42]
James Stout
Yeah, so a number of these things, right. Gender affirming care, perhaps care for people with HIV or preventing people from getting HIV through pre exposure prophylaxis. Like you said, these are things that have been at the center of the culture war for the current government. The things that they point to as, what are their sort of like in Paxton's, Paxton's construction of fascism, he talks about moral decline, right. And this is their moral decline, that this is what they use when they're constructing their kind of we will save you narrative. What does that mean for funding and like, what does that mean more importantly for your patients, for people who come to you for these different types of care?
- [74:28]
American Express Representative
I mean, I think it's terrifying. I think I'm more on the patient facing side. So a lot of the conversations I've been having are just about the uncertainty. I'm a prescriber for a lot of trans youth, adolescents and young adults. And so moreover, the uncertainty of just being able to, you know, get their medication, the stress of being publicly named and targeted in this culture war has just created a climate of fear. As my job, I want to be able to reassure patients that I am going to fight for them and do all that I can. But it's really scary. As Dan mentioned, a lot of our patients don't have financial safety net, they don't have a medical safety net. We're really the one option for them. And if our clinic does not continue to offer this type of care, these are our kids who are going to go without hormones. I prescribe puberty blockers. My work as a gender affirming care provider isn't just blockers and hormones, but those are medications that we are life saving. We know that unfortunately kids will suicide if they don't have access to those medications. And so I think, you know, talking about Funding, talking about kind of these bigger shifts politically, you know, are things that, unfortunately, a lot of the conversations I'm having are really coming just down to safety and safety planning and figuring out support networks and talking about creative ways to get hormones and if. If we can't prescribe them.
- [76:05]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [76:05]
Nathan King
I think it's worth talking about the fact that, like, there are. There are so many angles of attack on this. Right. There is the one that is just very clearly aimed at trans kids. Right. The EO that specifies, like protecting children. It's nonsense, but that is aimed at ending this care everywhere.
- [76:23]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [76:23]
Nathan King
Now, are they going to be able to do it everywhere? I don't know. Maybe, but not quickly. But they can end it for FQHCs all across the country by simply making it like the Hyde Amendment. If we were to perform abortion services at the place that I work, then we would lose our Fed 330 funding and we would lose our FQ designation, which would cut our rate in half and that would devastate the business and put us out and mean that we could not care for the thousands and thousands and thousands of other people that we care for besides those kids.
- [76:54]
James Stout
Right, right.
- [76:55]
Nathan King
Then there are also the just the doge fuckery that is going to harm all of this and may create a lot of the same outcomes.
- [77:03]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [77:03]
Nathan King
Which is they turned off grants kind of just across the board. Yes, some of them were targeted on things like gender affirming care, but most of them were just like, it's a grant, we're turning it off. And then there was the tro, but much of that funding has remained frozen. We have been told that the system is up and running and that they undid what they did and the courts stepped in and, oh, don't we have the courts still here in the United States? Isn't that a good thing? But they just kept the funding off, whether because they're incompetent or because they're actively defying the law, doesn't really matter. And as a result, federally qualified health centers all across the country have laid people off, they have closed clinics, and they have entirely gone underwater in some cases. And then those people are not there to treat the community that needs them so badly. And all of these systems are grounded in their communities. So when you lose, you know, the clinic that's in LA that had to close its doors for the office that's, you know, on one side of town, the people there knew that place. It was part of their community, part of their existence. It was grounded in that community. And its community's needs, and that's just gone. And this puts us in the very difficult position and, you know, leadership in the very difficult position of figuring out, well, do I worry about these trans youth and the fact that they might kill themselves, or do I worry about the impact that standing up on principle and saying, I won't toss them to the wolves might have on the rest of the system? And it becomes a very difficult sort of situation for us as providers to navigate. But, you know, in fairness to leadership, which I disagree with for them, too, yeah, that's tough.
- [78:35]
James Stout
Can you briefly explain, like, maybe lay out a timeline? Because we talked about executive orders there. We talked about a tro. There was a large number of executive orders. Right. In the last three weeks. So, like, maybe people missed them. Can you explain the pertinent executive orders? And then what's a tentative restraining order?
- [78:53]
Nathan King
Yeah. So on Trump's first day in office, on the day of his inauguration, so January 20th, he signs 100 some odd executive orders. The ones that are particularly of interest to us in healthcare were protecting children against chemical and surgical mutilation is the name of it, which is a disgusting and vile name.
- [79:13]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [79:14]
Nathan King
And then protecting women. Something, something, something.
- [79:17]
Hayley
Defending women.
- [79:18]
Nathan King
Yeah, defending women, which is similarly aimed at transgender individuals and I think will be used after we are under attack for trans youth to come after trans adults in federally qualified health centers as well. Those EOs led to. Later that week on Friday, we got emails to every PI, which is principal investigator on every federal grant that we had, that said because of those two, and there was one about dei, which is also an executive order. You are not allowed to use any of these grant dollars in service of anything in defiance of these three executive orders. So that was the first shot we got, and it came only four days later. It's threatening, but it wasn't specific.
- [80:02]
Molly White
Right.
- [80:02]
Nathan King
It didn't specifically say, we're going to do X, Y or Z. But it was. Here's. Here's the threat. The following Tuesday, Doge is is let loose and announces that they are freezing federal grant funding tied to anything that is in opposition to those things. If you actually looked at the Excel file that they released with the actual grants, it froze everything. Like, it was not just the stuff that they felt was in opposition to this. It was like everything. We have a ton of grants that were on that list at the agency that I work at, and boy, oh, boy, oh, boy, was there a lot of panic going around. Wednesday rolls around and they get a judge to come in and Sort of put a halt on it. And then later that day the press secretary says, oh, we're just going to rescind the memo, we're still going to freeze everything. And then the judge comes back and puts a temporary restraining order. So in theory, what that should have meant is that all of that grant funding once again flows and it did not. Importantly too, for us, given how much Medicaid dollars we take in Medicaid portals in all 50 states went down. So we could not get any of those dollars in service of what we were doing for 12 hours. But still it was this like very concerning situation because Medicaid was not on their list of things that they were after and yet we couldn't even access it at the state level. Yeah, a few more weeks go by and there's news popping about, hey, you said you unfroze stuff, but it's still frozen. Another judge issued an order saying that like, no, for real, I need it this time. Unfreeze everything. I know some of the grants that we had that we couldn't access seem to have come back online. But I don't know, you know, I think it would be an impossible thing to do an accounting of like every single one that might have been turned off that might, might or might not be back on right now. But I, I am doubtful that at this point every single grant across the federal agency is, is potentially available for folks. Just seems unlikely to me.
- [81:57]
James Stout
Yeah, we should pivot to advertisements here. So I'm going to do that and then we'll. Okay, we are back. So you talked about like these grants being turned off or not coming. What does that mean? Like, does that mean people don't get care? Does that mean providers don't get paid? Does that mean they can't access their prescriptions? Like what does it look like if I'm trying to access care through one of your clinics?
- [82:30]
American Express Representative
So yeah, I'll speak to that a little bit on the prescriber side side because I think, you know, having direct contact with someone who works in the administration is really the only way that I have really been able to get any updates. So as a healthcare provider, it's been utter chaos. Basically every day we've gotten different messaging around whether or not appointments can be scheduled, new patients can, you know, schedule intakes, whether or not we're able to prescribe these life saving medications. And no one knows exactly gender affirming care is basically healthcare. There's nothing that separates it. There's no hard line, there's no clear distinction it is medically indicated evidence based care. So saying you can't do gender affirming care, it literally doesn't make any sense in terms of what we do as prescribers. And on my end, I've been faced with intimidation. I've been faced with kind of whisper networks of misinformation coming from administration trying to get us to stop prescribing because they do see this type of care as a liability. I'm still prescribing. There is no state law in the state that I am in that prevents my ability to practice to the full extent of my scope. There are also no medical indications for me to stop prescribing. And I'm ethically bound as a nurse practitioner to do what I believe is best for my patients, which is to continue to provide them with the care that they need. But it's terrifying.
- [84:07]
Nathan King
I think importantly, Haley and I have the advantage of working for a more economically stable institution. There's a lot of health clinics out there that have a week's worth of working capital, right? So if all of a sudden they lose access to every grant dollar, they lose access to their Fed. 330, they were scheduled to draw down on a grant that was going to cover a whole bunch of upcoming expenses, but they haven't done it yet. And then they can't. Like in very real ways that may mean that the doors are closed and the place goes under and that no one can get care there. And there is this real challenge of, you know, how do we decide what is the best thing to do? But for me, and what sort of started me working with in our agency at least to organize around this, is that like this is an anti fascist practice. That is the right medical thing to do. It is the right ethical thing to do. But it is also our chance to take an antifascist stance against this government. Because if we don't stand now for the very first group they're coming for, then the next group, which is without question trans adults and undocumented people, then those groups will fall just as quickly. And then at some point we're doing the poem the first they came for the socialist thing. And I just refuse to be a part of that.
- [85:17]
James Stout
Yeah, let's talk about what that means then. Like you said, it's difficult to get any response from administration. Right. In terms of what you can do, in terms of what you can't do, how are staff and providers organizing to make sure that they're able to keep providing for their patients?
- [85:37]
American Express Representative
So just to Provide also a little bit of a peek into the broader landscape of this. Our clinic is not alone in their confusion on how they've been handling this. Not only fqhc, but also hospital affiliated clinics, academic medical clinics, have basically, clinic by clinic, decided on their own plan on how to manage this, which is also incredibly confusing for providers and for patients. But something that was really heartening was that NYU Langone, this was in the news recently, they canceled appointments for two kids, literally just two kids, which is more than enough. And it sparked this enormous outcry and protests. And so I think there's also on my end, a lot of solidarity building with other providers who are doing this work and a lot of inspiration. There are clinics out there, some who are FQHCs like us, who have stood firm and they've said our doors are going to stay open, we're going to keep providing this care. And so I think there are models out there and I think that there are networks of healthcare providers who are committed to, to continue to advocate and just continue to do this. Right. Because a lot of what we're facing right now is intimidation. It's not actual legal threats as of yet.
- [86:59]
Nathan King
Yeah, I think the organizing side has been challenging, but also hugely rewarding. Right. It became really obvious really early on that both from the federal government's perspective as well as from our organization's perspective, that the uncertainty was where they wanted us all to live and die. That was the place that served them and their goals the most. And so how does uncertainty sort of foster. Well, people don't talk to one another, right. Like this is true kind of in organizational census, across the board, right. If you're in a union, you don't talk about your salary. It doesn't benefit you, it benefits the boss. And so if we're not talking to one another about where our lines are, who we're going to treat, whether we're going to keep doing it or listen to them, what we're being told or not being told, that we're consulting lawyers, all these other kinds of things. Then we're all just alone in the dark, kind of, you know, trying not to scream and cry about the horrors that are happening, anything around us. So we pulled together folks with conversation here, conversation there, folks who before anything was going on internally, you know, made really bold statements about what they would and would not do around this kind of stuff. And now all of a sudden there's an internal network that's looking at, well, okay, so individually we can keep doing this care because it's the right thing to do. But as a group, if they start coming after us, we have a lot more power. There's a lot more that we can do. And I suspect, and you know, Haley's getting at this point, that, like, there are probably a network of us across the entire country in these kind of settings that are not talking amongst ourselves at our workplace, but are really not talking about it amongst ourselves on a national level. And I think we have some power that could be used there to really make a difference in all of this. And I am optimistic that if we talk about this, we get this out there, we make sure everyone's communicating openly about it, that there's a real possibility that we can, can work together to prevent this from being the first of many dominoes to fall.
- [88:49]
American Express Representative
And one thing that's interesting, I think, is that with trans healthcare, trans healthcare is inherently radical. Like, trans healthcare is not something that came from the kind of medical hierarchy. This is by and large a field that was communal. Trans people were doing their own trans healthcare before it became kind of institutionalized into a lot of these spaces. So I think we also have a lot of providers who are willing to fuck shit up. Right. Like the community and the providers are intertwined. And I do think there is a real kind of radical bent to this, this type of work, which is why I think a lot of us have been so easily able to collectivize and strategize and kind of come together. It's a pretty small world as well.
- [89:39]
Nathan King
Well, we, we sat down on a, on a call and talked about, you know, what are we going to do? And I made mention that, like, oh, through my other organizing work, I've got a DIY connection for estradiol. So that's a huge thing that will help us if we can't prescribe this anymore, if Medicaid stops covering it, yada, yada, yada. I was like, but I don't have a, you know, a DIY solution for tea. If anyone knows of anybody, that'd be great. And immediately someone's like, oh, yeah, absolutely, I, I do. It's tested. It's a 99.9% pure or we're ready to go. So now I wouldn't have done that. There was no way for us to know that that was the kind of radical work that people were doing if not for coming together on this kind of stuff.
- [90:14]
James Stout
Yeah, I think maybe we should explain the inherent risks legally and then distinction between those two hormones legally. Right. Like, if people are unaware.
- [90:24]
American Express Representative
Yeah. So as A medical provider. Again, I have to be a little bit careful here, but basically because has testosterone has been used by mostly the CIS male community as an anabolic steroid and used, you know, and some would call like anabolic steroid misuse or steroid use disorder. It is a controlled substance. Estradiol is not. They're both bioidentical hormones. Every human on this planet, their body makes estrogen and testosterone. Ent, estradiol and testosterone. However, in the United States, testosterone is considered a controlled substance, which makes it a little more tricky for folks to access without a prescription and also can put them at legal risk if they do so.
- [91:13]
James Stout
Right. Like there's a built in legal consequence for people who are trying to manufacture that or who are trying to obtain it, like outside of the sort of prescription system. Not that there aren't other probably illegal threats coming down the pipeline, I guess.
- [91:26]
Hayley
Also testosterone is. Yes, it is a controlled substance. It, it does, it does flow in the bodybuilding community.
- [91:34]
James Stout
Yeah. It's not well controlled.
- [91:36]
Molly White
Yes.
- [91:36]
Hayley
And that is also like worth stating because yes, if you go to your average gym, oh yeah, you can walk.
- [91:44]
James Stout
Across the border to Tijuana and see like, you know, how gas stations have the prices like unleaded premium. Yeah. You can get testosterone prices like displayed in the same fashion.
- [91:53]
American Express Representative
I mean I'm sure you're, you're huge fans of Joe Rogan. So many, many fellow podcast bros of my other patients who are not trans have been influenced to purchase testosterone because of our good friend Joe Rogan.
- [92:10]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. Fascinating stuff.
- [92:11]
American Express Representative
Yeah.
- [92:12]
Nathan King
Which is also gender affirming care for whatever that's worth. Like gender affirming care too, too.
- [92:17]
James Stout
Yes, they do. It's a lot easier for them right now. So let's talk about like what this organizing looks like on the ground. Right. Like a, if someone's working, maybe they're not in a fqhc. Right. Maybe they're working in academic health center maybe. Maybe they're working, you know, in one of the many other places where you can access gender affirming care in this country. And they are feeling like alone or they're scared and they're not receiving any affirmation or help from their management and they don't know who they can talk to among their colleagues. Like, how are people connecting? Like, what are people talking about? And like how can people who are. Because, you know, the healthcare system is vast in this country because it duplicates itself because the nature of American privatized healthcare, like how can people who want to continue providing care for patients do that. How do they organize their colleagues? How do they contact people who are already organizing? Like, let's talk through the nuts and bolts of it.
- [93:26]
American Express Representative
I mean, I think there's a lot of national orgs out there that are really doing the work. So if you're a medical provider, I would highly recommend to join Glamour, which is a gay and lesbian medical association, because they have some lawsuits. And as a member of Glamour, that could possibly give you some additional protection. Following other orgs like Lambda Legal Sage, which is an organization for an elder gay, lesbian and queer trans folks, trans people have existed and have built organizations. A lot of those organizations are fighting this on a national level. And some of those are more geared toward kind of healthcare professionals like Glamour.
- [94:11]
Nathan King
Emma, I would say there's two conversations that we all need to be having. Like, those external organizations are huge and necessary for direction within your own space. You have to talk to your colleagues in a way that's honest and talk to them about risk taking. Talk to them about where you will and will not budge on some of these kind of things. Talk to them about the value of the work that you all do because there's more of you doing it. Talk to your trans colleagues. They exist. They're out there. Like, they have very strong opinions on this. I am sure, sure. And then talk to a lawyer. Talk to an employment lawyer, because your corporate attorneys have very different goals than you do. Their goal is simply to protect the company and its bottom line. And both they and the federal government and the sort of DOJ are spewing absolute. So don't let them flood the zone with nonsense. Get a lawyer who can tell you what's nonsense and stand firmly in that, because it is. And then you start thinking about as an organization, as a group, as a set of employees communicating with, you know, leadership about these kind of things. Know that the law is actually not on their side, it's on yours. And let them know that they are exposing themselves to vulnerability for malpractice and for civil rights violations and any number of other things that they probably don't want to be on the hook for. This is the leverage that we've got right now. It seems to have slowed things down a little bit internally for us that they've had to confront like a very weak, well pointed out legal opinion that said that, like, they were exposing their providers to civil lawsuits if they didn't do this and that the ftca, the Federal Tort Claims act, didn't protect people under these guides. That has been really Beneficial to us. The other thing I would say is, like, there's a real union sort of feel to a lot of this. And as we started coming together, a bunch of us realized, well, we all kind of had union conversations somewhere along the way. But corporate unions and like, SEIU represents a lot of, like, individual sort of arms of companies, like the ones that we work at. They aren't interested in the politics of the work you do. They're interested in your benefits, they're interested in you as a worker, but they're not interested in, like, your relationship to the work. And so we are approaching this not necessarily as a union, but from the perspective that if we need to strike on behalf of. Of patients and their access to care, like, that's a tool in our toolbox, and we don't have to do anything more than declare it a strike to be protected under the NLRB and some of these various different things. And we can do it for political reasons instead of for pay reasons, which means we could do it as a diverse group instead of as all the nurses, all the advanced practice providers, all of the psychologists and therapists and LCSWs, where they break us apart by discipline instead of by, you know, what sort of managerial status you are.
- [97:06]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah. I think that's a very good point. I read a book recently about how the. The longshoremen in San Francisco stopped weapons going to Chile or El Salvador by striking and refusing to load weapons onto ships. And, like, that's a union energy we could use right now.
- [97:22]
Dan
Yeah, yeah.
- [97:23]
James Stout
I think people would be well advised to, like, I will say that they'd be well advised to check with federal and local law because, like, some state legal landscapes can be very different. Right. I want to end with, like, people are probably afraid of accessing care. Right? Like, like, people are probably afraid of going to see their providers. Like, understandably, like you said before, like, especially kids or people under 18 are, like, right in the center of. The President of the United States called out a friend of mine personally by name recently. She's a trans athlete. And, like, they're really coming after people. I understand that people are afraid. Like, what should they know if they're concerned about their hormone supply or they're. They're on puberty blockers right now. Like, if people are listening, what would you. Maybe they don't know where their provider stands, you know?
- [98:12]
American Express Representative
Yeah, I mean, I tell my patients this, but I'm in awe of them. They're incredible. And a lot of them are nerdy theater kids who love cats. And, and they want to just exist. And some of them are also incredible, outspoken activists. They are just amazing. And I will fight with everything that I've got for them and I, I really hope they know that.
- [98:41]
Nathan King
I think one of the mantras I've been given to fellow colleagues as well as to our leadership to like, get their heads on straight is that like, fascism is messy.
- [98:49]
John Cameron Mitchell
Right.
- [98:50]
Nathan King
Like it's, it's a scary, very messy. There are a lot of throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. But the things that in theory are still in place, like when and if they fall, we have different problems than the ones we're facing now. Right. So we still have in this country protections for your healthcare information. So if what you worry about in going to the doctor is that someone will find out that you're trans and put you on a list, like, I can't tell you that's never going to happen, but I can tell you that if it happens through your healthcare clinic, like, we have significantly changed the threat model that we're all living in because HIPAA doesn't matter anymore and doesn't exist. Your providers are spending enormous amounts of time thinking carefully about how they document, where they document, how much of a deal they want to make it, whether or not they can change the thing they're prescribing for you and what diagnosis is for. We are finding ways to sort of throw as much cover and shade and, you know, camouflage over this as we can can. But you shouldn't not come get care. Your life matters. You being in the body that you were meant to have matters. Come talk to us, come ask for help. We're here to do it and we're not going to stop until they make us. And right now they can't make us. And so we're going to keep doing it.
- [100:02]
American Express Representative
And I think the mantra of trans people have always existed. Trans people exist. And personally, I'm going to do my best to make sure that for every single one of my patients that, that they continue to get what they need.
- [100:16]
Hayley
However that looks like, then it is good to hear. I know a lot of trans people have essentially trauma with, with aspects of the medical community, establishment, whatever.
- [100:27]
American Express Representative
Yeah.
- [100:27]
Hayley
And like, you know, not, not all practitioners, maybe as much in our camp as maybe you are. And I, I, I would encourage people, if they are, if they are still looking for care through like these, these sorts of channels, you should, you should try to find out where other trans people in your city are already going. Yeah, there, there's, there's certainly like, clinics will have stuff on their website that indicate that they either specialize in this or they. They offer this as opposed to, you know, maybe just a general. General practitioner who may not be, you know, the greatest in this vein. And like this, this still happens. I've, I've. I've talked to a lot of friends recently who've, Who've spoken about having increasingly uncomfortable experiences with nurses or doctors, years where they're trying out, like, different clinics or different or different providers, university providers. So it is definitely worth doing some research beforehand. So, you know, the place you're going is going to be like, with you, which is just an unfortunate reality of being trans. But that is. That has been the case for, for a long time and it only continues to be a factor when considering care.
- [101:30]
American Express Representative
Absolutely.
- [101:31]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [101:31]
Nathan King
It's really important to ask. Ask your friends that. That's, that's really solid advice, in part because whether I like it or not, a lot of organizations are taking the stuff that says, hey, we treat trans people down off their website, off their marketing materials. We are not trying to draw that attention. It doesn't mean we don't do it doesn't mean we're not skilled and trained and educated and smart and passionate about it. It just means we don't really want to totally fly a trans flag on the roof right now because it's just going to cause everybody harm. So talk to your friends. Talk to people in your community. They know us, we know them. I have a lot of activism experience outside of my work, and it's amazing how many of those people end up being the same people that are in this conversation because of. Of the way that this all works.
- [102:13]
American Express Representative
Yeah, yeah, I was just going to say, I think, unfortunately, it is. It is the norm. And evidence shows that, like, large evidence of studies show that trans people are treated pretty horribly by the healthcare system. And most of my patients have experienced that in some way or another. But like I was talking about before, a lot of trans healthcare kind of from a DIY community, and there's a lot of really good community information about, you know, kind of who to trust and who you can go to in terms of finding an allied provider.
- [102:47]
James Stout
Yeah, yeah, I think that's really good. I think that was really great. Guys, thank you so much for your time and for your words for people. Is there anything else you want to share? Or perhaps if people want to support your efforts somehow, or support people's access to care, there's an organization you could direct them to or maybe like a way people can reach out to you or I know a lot of people, there are people in my family who are healthcare providers who have substantially changed their outlook on the world and politics by how terribly their trans patients have been treated. So like, if, you know, like some of us have been organizing for a minute, some of us have been organizing for like literally a minute. And like, how do those people access these networks? Like, how can people who are not in healthcare support, support you and what you're doing and reach out?
- [103:31]
American Express Representative
The gender liberation movement is incredible. They're doing a lot of work, kind of public facing to really get the point across on why this is so essential and also why everybody should have the right to their own bodily and gender autonomy. I think I mentioned earlier. But lama if you're on the healthcare side and you know there, there are also kind of, if you're in an academic setting looking to wpath so World Professional association for Transgender Health, kind of going to the experts in this field and really following and mirroring what they're doing.
- [104:10]
Nathan King
I think if you're looking as a CIS person who gets your care somewhere that might get federal funding, but this is a thing that you care about, would encourage you to sort of make people get on record about this kind of stuff, right? It's been the most distasteful piece of all of this is the kind of like weasel old hiding in all of this. So force them on the record, ask them. If they don't tell you, send them an email. If they don't, you know, respond to the email, send a follow up email. Like make people get on the record about this so that we know where their values are. And if their values don't align with yours, take your business elsewhere. Because at the end of the day, healthcare is a business because the United States sucks. And so we have to use those dollars in the ways that we can. And it matters in a lot of ways. I don't know that anyone will care to and I certainly don't want to present us as the people with all the answers here because we just like are figuring this out as we go too. But you can email us at Community Health Resistance Proton me and maybe let's have a conversation. Maybe there's like a ton of people in the FQ world who want to do like a Amazon or a Starbucks, like DIY Union Project, where we're all working on this together for the politics rather than the pay as the primary sort of reason for it. Let's, let's, let's be a red Union and get something going. I don't know that we can. I don't know that it's the right call, but I imagine there's more of us out there feeling this way than not.
- [105:31]
James Stout
So yeah, and like, whatever it is, we're stronger together than we are apart. So like, talking is how we fix this. Thank you so much guys. I really appreciate you being so open about this. And yeah, I hope that you succeed. You're able to keep taking care of people.
- [105:45]
Robert Evans
Thank you.
- [105:45]
Nathan King
We hope so too.
- [106:03]
American Express Representative
With the American Express Gold Card, I.
- [106:05]
Molly White
Can earn four times membership rewards points at US Supermarkets.
- [106:08]
American Express Representative
So with all these groceries, I'm also getting points. Learn more@americanexpress.com US Explore Gold Terms and.
- [106:17]
Molly White
Points Cap apply While this podcast might.
- [106:20]
Hayley
Be keeping you from being distracted, here's.
- [106:22]
Molly White
Something to level up your focus. I'm Amantha Imber, host of the podcast How I Work.
- [106:28]
Hayley
It's a show where I interview some.
- [106:29]
Molly White
Of the world's most successful people and uncover how exactly they construct their days. From how to combat a scrolling addiction to morning rituals and productivity hacks, we explore how some of the best stay disciplined and manage their time effectively.
- [106:45]
Hayley
Where ambition meets inspiration Search for How.
- [106:48]
Molly White
I work on the free iHeart app.
- [106:50]
Hayley
Or in whatever podcast app you're listening to.
- [106:57]
John Cameron Mitchell
I'm Michael Phillips. I wrote a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis and have co authored an upcoming book on the history of racing of eugenics in Texas called the Purifying Knife.
- [107:08]
Mark Seale
And I'm Steven Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist who covers extremism and far right movements for a variety of publications, including the Texas observer and the Barbed.
- [107:18]
John Cameron Mitchell
Wire School board meetings used to be boring. Board members typically spent hours discussing financial reports, land purchases, plumbing contracts, and other tedious topics. But beginning in 2020, Christopher Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker and fellow at the right wing Heritage foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, launched a campaign to convince Americans that public schools have become communist indoctrination centers. Rufo falsely claimed that public school teachers were brainwashing school children with something called Critical Race Theory, or CRT for short. Adherents of Critical Race Theory argue that racism has become so intrinsically entwined in American politics, law and culture that anti discrimination laws typically fail. While CRT is studied in some graduate schools and law programs, it hasn't been taught at the grade school level where the outrage has been directed.
- [108:20]
Mark Seale
That's certainly not the case in Texas Texas, which influences curriculums across the nation due to its large population and purchasing power of textbooks. But precision wasn't the point of Rufo's campaign. Rather, it was to refashion CRT into a sort of political cudgel, something that Rufo admitted to in a series of tweets in 2021. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think critical race theory, rufo wrote. We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
- [109:00]
John Cameron Mitchell
End quote.
- [109:01]
Mark Seale
On Fox News, Newsmax and other right wing media outlets, Rufo convinced parents that instead of teaching kids reading, writing and arithmetic, public school teachers were using CRT to brainwash white children into hating themselves and goading black children into hating white people. Radical teachers and professors, Rufo warned, had launched a sinister campaign to destroy the American way of life.
- [109:28]
Robert Evans
In a foundational paper called Whiteness as.
- [109:30]
Dan
Property, the critical race theorist Cheryl Harris.
- [109:32]
Nathan King
Has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing.
- [109:36]
Dan
Land and wealth from the rich and.
- [109:37]
Hayley
Redistributing it along racial lines.
- [109:40]
John Cameron Mitchell
Ruffo's timing could not have been more perfect. Perfect the artificial CRT panic broke out during the COVID pandemic. Parents already felt frustration and fury about the hardships of campus closings, remote learning and mass mandates. Now convinced that their children were being taught to scapegoat white people for all the country's problems, parents across the country exploded in rage at local school boards. Reuters reported on one meeting that turned violent in Loudoun County, Virginia. Virginia.
- [110:15]
Nathan King
What had been planned as a.
- [110:16]
Robert Evans
Typical school board meeting in Virginia's wealthy Loudoun county this week devolved into pandemonium, with hundreds of parents flooding an auditorium.
- [110:28]
Molly White
To accuse the school system of teaching their kids that racism in America is structural and systemic, something the school board.
- [110:36]
Nathan King
Denies is part of the career curriculum.
- [110:39]
Hayley
Things got so heated that the board members eventually walked out, leaving the police to deal with the unruly crowd. Two people left in handcuffs.
- [110:52]
Nathan King
Loudoun County.
- [110:53]
Robert Evans
School board has been roiled for months by accusations that it has embraced critical race theory, a school of thought that.
- [111:00]
Molly White
Maintains that racism is ingrained in US Law and institution institutions and that legacies.
- [111:06]
Robert Evans
Of slavery and segregation have created an.
- [111:08]
Molly White
Uneven playing field for black Americans.
- [111:12]
Robert Evans
The idea that crt, as it's known.
- [111:14]
Molly White
Is infiltrating public schools has become a.
- [111:17]
Nathan King
Rallying cry for conservatives who, like many.
- [111:20]
Robert Evans
In Loudoun, say it is being used.
- [111:22]
Molly White
To indoctrinate children, that America is a racist country.
- [111:26]
Dan
Critical race theory is anti white and it's not American.
- [111:31]
Mark Seale
Those with an ear for historical rhymes may find this outcry familiar resistance to racial integration and the civil rights era movements drew similar accusations of being hostile to whites and being a product of anti American communism. And those with experience teaching students might chuckle at the accusations of ideologically motivated brainwashing and indoctrination. A common joke posted by teachers online is that, quote, if we could indoctrinate students, students would always read the syllabus. But that didn't stop panic over CRT expanding to include anti LGBTQ sentiment as well, with queer students and teachers who supported them being placed squarely in the crosshairs of a well funded national hate machine dedicated to ginning up fear among local parents. Here's a clip from one speech I personally witnessed witnessed at the school board meeting of my hometown school district, Grapevine, Colleyville, from August 2022 and break simple truths.
- [112:31]
Robert Evans
There's only two genders and boys should.
- [112:33]
John Cameron Mitchell
Go to boys rooms, girls should go.
- [112:34]
Dan
To girls restrooms, and guess what?
- [112:37]
Robert Evans
Teachers shouldn't be forced to use your.
- [112:39]
Dan
Freaking made up fantasy pronouns. Fight like hell.
- [112:43]
Robert Evans
Hold the line against the LGBT mafia.
- [112:46]
Dan
And their dang pedo fans.
- [112:50]
James Stout
Keep winning.
- [112:51]
Molly White
You know what?
- [112:52]
Robert Evans
Keep the win.
- [112:53]
Mark Seale
They can keep the monkeypox.
- [112:55]
Dan
How's that working?
- [112:56]
Mark Seale
In fact, keep winning so much, we'll keep coming.
- [112:59]
Dan
You know what?
- [113:00]
Robert Evans
We're gonna keep coming so hard.
- [113:02]
Dan
The only thing these woke hearts got.
- [113:03]
Robert Evans
To figure out is whether it's on.
- [113:05]
Molly White
Their face, back, butt or thighs.
- [113:07]
Robert Evans
Woo. Get some.
- [113:09]
Mark Seale
Thank you. As absurd as all this may seem, there was something to this national phenomenon that was rooted in reality. Reality. As of 2020, the United States had become more culturally diverse, racially integrated, and accepting of LGBTQ people than ever before, and our education systems have increasingly reflected that reality. There's also a deep irony to this reaction. Prior to the advances of the civil rights era and beyond, schools in the United States have often been the centers of ideologically motivated education, but not the fantasy Bolshevik propaganda that outrages the Right. In fact, it's usually been the opposite. For most of its history, American public schools have effectively advanced white supremacy, female subordination, and submission to capitalism. In this episode, we're going to look at what has actually been taught in American schools over the years, with a particular focus in Texas and how what you learn about American history depends on where you you live and how Christian supremacists are successfully inserting their theology into school curriculums in much of the country. With Texas playing a leading role.
- [114:19]
John Cameron Mitchell
Textbooks before the 1950s and 1960s Civil rights era were explicitly and astonishingly white supremacist schoolbooks in the south, for instance, portrayed Confederates as gallant gentlemen fighting for a noble lost cause. This influenced popular culture as we see in films like Gone with the Wind. Meanwhile, school kids were taught that abolitionists who wanted to end slavery before the Civil War were terrorists who needlessly plunged the country into civil war. And this, too, steeped into the public imagination. Movies like Santa Fe Trail, starring Van Heflin.
- [114:56]
Dan
The time is coming when the rest of us are going to wipe you.
- [114:58]
John Cameron Mitchell
And your kind off the face of the earth. According to the myths promoted first in schools, then echoed in mass entertainment, slavery would have gone away eventually if only white slave owning Southerners had been left alone to figure it out themselves. Screenplay writers have often echoed what they heard in the classroom, as we see in this scene from the 1940 film Santa Fe Trail. Here, Raymond Massey plays John Brown, a white abolitionist who tried to start a slave Rebellion Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1858. Massie portrays him as a thoroughly crazed maniac, while Errol Flynn depicts future Confederate General Jeb Stuart as sweetly rational.
- [115:44]
Dan
Half of the people in America believe in your theory. A lot of them even condone your methods. That'll guarantee you a public trial.
- [115:52]
John Cameron Mitchell
I'm not on trial with the nation itself.
- [115:56]
Hayley
Are you too stupid and blinded by.
- [115:58]
John Cameron Mitchell
A uniform to see what I see? A dark and evil curse laying all over this land. A carnal sin against God can only.
- [116:07]
Dan
Be wiped out in blood. But why in blood? The people of Virginia considered a resolution to abolish slavery for a long time. They sense that it's a moral wrong and the rest of the south will follow Virginia's example. All I ask is time.
- [116:22]
Mark Seale
From the 1880s until the 1960s, 60s schoolbooks depicted the country's only brief experiment with multiracial democracy at the time. The reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877. As a time of rampant corruption, these books often described emancipated African Americans as ignorant, lazy and expecting government handouts, while their white allies were portrayed as crooks.
- [116:49]
John Cameron Mitchell
American school children, furthermore, learned from their teachers that so called radical democracy was not a good idea. And sometimes dictatorship was the better option. The 1924 textbook, Our World Today and A History of Modern Civilization, published two years after Mussolini's fascist government took over Italy, had nothing but praise for that nation's new dictator. The authors told the impressionable high school students the following about the world's first fascist leader.
- [117:19]
Robert Evans
Mussolini has chosen a ministry made up.
- [117:22]
Molly White
Of capable men and has straightened up.
- [117:24]
Robert Evans
The badly demoralized finances of the country.
- [117:27]
Molly White
He and his followers are accused of suppressing liberty and downing the communists by violence.
- [117:34]
Robert Evans
Nevertheless, he has done much to do away with strikes and to re establish conditions as they were before the economic demoralization of World War I set in again.
- [117:47]
Mark Seale
Schoolbooks reinforced an American culture in the 1920s that responded to the horrors of World War I, labor unrest and the impact of immigration by becoming not only more intolerant but also more anti democratic.
- [118:01]
John Cameron Mitchell
All the while, Mussolini's propaganda machine churned out images of a thriving country and a virile leader.
- [118:07]
Nathan King
Ill duce stripped down for the camera.
- [118:10]
John Cameron Mitchell
Worked side by side with the peasants and wrestled wild animals.
- [118:14]
Mark Seale
Never mind that this one had no teeth.
- [118:17]
John Cameron Mitchell
Nonetheless, nevertheless, it was working. Mussolini attracted fans worldwide, including Thomas Edison.
- [118:23]
Dan
Sigmund Freud and Mohandis Gandhi.
- [118:26]
John Cameron Mitchell
Here he speaks to his many supporters among Italian Americans.
- [118:31]
Robert Evans
Italy, the Italians of America who are working to make America great.
- [118:39]
John Cameron Mitchell
Another textbook published in 1935, the Record of America, told students that the so called founding Fathers like Alexander Hamilton, were not big believers in democracy. Democracy, an attitude the authors seem to endorse. As the Record of America put it.
- [118:54]
Robert Evans
The founders had little faith in the.
- [118:56]
Molly White
Ability of people as a whole to maintain self control and wisdom in government.
- [119:02]
Robert Evans
They had no confidence in the man without property. A man who had failed to accumulate property would be regarded as shiftless, lazy or incompetent and not deserving a voice.
- [119:15]
Molly White
In the government of others.
- [119:18]
Robert Evans
The Constitution was written to retain power in the hands of those who were least radical and to set obstacles in.
- [119:26]
Molly White
The way of radical mob action.
- [119:28]
Mark Seale
After the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements, history textbooks for the first time covered the horrors of slavery, the heroism of African American abolitionists like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass and the evils of the Ku Klux Klan with Klan clarity. But the backlash was swift, particularly after the election of the first African American president, Barack Obama and the rise of the hyper conservative Tea Party. In response, in 2010 Tea Party supporters took control of the 10 Texas State School Board which has control over Texas schoolbook curriculums. They felt that this reckoning with America's racist past undermined patriotism and demanded a rewrite of school lesson plans.
- [120:22]
John Cameron Mitchell
In 2015, Ronnie Dean Barron got a text from her son Kobe, who was glancing at a 9th grade geography textbook published by McGraw Hill assigned him by his high school in parallel Texas, New York, Houston. He sent her a video highlighting a map and it's shocking caption. Soon Burren posted her son's video online. That video, as KPRC reported, spread outrage across the nation.
- [120:50]
James Stout
A video post on Ronnie D. Buren's Facebook page. So I'm going to show you the.
- [120:54]
Robert Evans
Book and then there's just an interesting section went viral. Her video has been viewed more than 1.8 million times times and has 48,000 shares.
- [121:03]
Hayley
To get to the topic of conversation.
- [121:05]
Dan
You literally have to turn through the.
- [121:07]
Robert Evans
Pages of her son's geography textbook. Immigration in the United States can be.
- [121:12]
Dan
Divided into four district periods Kobe, who's.
- [121:14]
Robert Evans
In the ninth grade at Pearland High School, was studying immigration when he read.
- [121:18]
Dan
This in his textbook, a comment that.
- [121:19]
Robert Evans
Referenced African slaves as workers as if.
- [121:23]
Hayley
We worked our way up in America.
- [121:25]
John Cameron Mitchell
As if we came here by choice.
- [121:27]
Robert Evans
For a better life.
- [121:29]
Mark Seale
The offensive caption read in full, quote, the Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations. The publisher of the book, simply titled World Geography, later apologized for the euphemism, noting that it did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. The company said it would revise the digital version of the text and future print versions, but it was unclear at the time when the new edition would be in students hands.
- [122:07]
John Cameron Mitchell
The caption wasn't an accident. McGraw Hill had given the state of Texas what it wanted Rather than anything like critical race theory, the State board of Education 2010 adopted changes in Texas curriculum standards for public schools. Schools known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills that imposed a whitewash of American slavery, raised doubts about human caused climate change, and imposed other right wing content to be sold in Texas. School textbooks had to meet the board's standards.
- [122:39]
Mark Seale
Texas State Board of Education members are elected from districts that tilt the body towards rural parts of the state and serve four year terms while the governor appoints the chair of the board. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the board has been dominated by Christian right activists. As a 2013 PBS report notes, Don.
- [122:58]
Robert Evans
McElroy has three jobs and he loves them all.
- [123:02]
American Express Representative
Good morning, Dr. McElroy's office.
- [123:04]
Robert Evans
Job number one, dentist job number two, Sunday school teacher and job number three, member of the Texas State Board of Education, a seat he's held for the last 12 years.
- [123:19]
Molly White
But it's that third job which has put this dentist and Sunday school teacher from Bryan, Texas into a national debate over what kids are taught in school.
- [123:28]
Robert Evans
Critics have accused McLeroy of injecting his.
- [123:30]
Molly White
Religious conservative beliefs into the curriculum.
- [123:34]
Robert Evans
About every 10 years, the board revises.
- [123:36]
Molly White
The textbook standards for different subjects.
- [123:39]
Robert Evans
Any books bought by the state must.
- [123:41]
Molly White
Conform to these guidelines the last big battle was over the science standards. This year, he's tackling social studies.
- [123:51]
John Cameron Mitchell
The demands Texas makes of textbook publishers matter. As PBS reported a decade ago, according.
- [123:57]
Molly White
To publishing Insiders, textbooks are often tailored to fit Texas standards because Texas is.
- [124:04]
Robert Evans
The largest buyer of textbooks. That means the choices made here could determine books that other states will buy. And that's led to a school fight that has the entire country looking on.
- [124:16]
John Cameron Mitchell
This is how Kobe Burren ended up with the world geography textbook that used the word workers to describe chattel slaves. Kathy Miller of the anti censorship group Texas Freedom Network said, quote, it's no accident that this happened in Texas. We have a textbook adoption process that's so politicized and so flat flawed that's become almost a punchline for comedians. Those serious about education aren't laughing, however. In 2018, the state board removed Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be presidential nominee of a major political party, from the list of major historical figures. Texas students must learn about a decision later reversed after embarrassing News coverage in 2010. The board mandated that textbooks depict the Civil War as primarily a struggle over states rights rights and not slavery, a choice that was later modified in 2018 to return slavery as the primary cause but still maintain that, quote, states rights and sectionalism were key contributing factors. Approved books still tell students that segregated black schools in the Jim Crow era, quote, had similar buildings, buses and teachers as white schools. Maintaining a hint of the separate but equal logics that upheld segregated, one textbook included a cartoon in which a space alien lands on Earth and asks if he's eligible for affirmative action programs.
- [125:42]
Mark Seale
Texas standards also misled students into thinking there was controversy about whether human activity has led to climate change and to, quote, consider all sides of scientific evidence regarding evolution. Even though the scientific consensus in favor of fossil fuels triggering climate change and also the scientific consensus regarding evolution is.
- [126:03]
John Cameron Mitchell
Nearly unanimous, students can get dramatically different versions of American history based on which state they attend schools. A New York Times comparison of textbooks used at California Texas showed that both versions of the same history textbook include an annotated Bill of Rights in reference to the Second Amendment. However, the California textbook notes that several federal court rulings have allowed regulation of gun sales and ownership. The Texas version of the same book replaces this commentary with a, quote, blank white space. As the New York Times reported, Texas.
- [126:40]
Mark Seale
And California textbooks both introduce students to African American authors during the Harlem Renaissance, but only Texas students are told that, quote, some dismissed the quality of the literature produced by the Harlem Renaissance.
- [126:55]
John Cameron Mitchell
As the New York Times reported, the California version of a History textbook addressed the issue of white flight, the phenomena whereby parents moved from cities when schools became integrated and moved to overwhelmingly Anglo suburbs. The California textbook said this.
- [127:12]
Robert Evans
Some people wished to escape the crime and the congestion of the city.
- [127:16]
Molly White
Movement of some white people from cities.
- [127:19]
Robert Evans
To suburbs was driven by a desire.
- [127:22]
Molly White
To get away from more culturally diverse neighborhoods.
- [127:25]
Robert Evans
Others believed the suburbs offered better and more affordable living.
- [127:31]
John Cameron Mitchell
The Texas version of the same textbook deleted the sentence referring to racism as a motive for white flight, but left the reference to a fear of crime. Reframing what students learned about why suburbs grew so rapidly after World War II. The Texas state board also specifically asked one textbook publisher to emphasize how many clergy signed the Declaration of Independence. Independence and to underscore the supposed importance of religion to the founders. These particular demands were the result of intense lobbying by a Texas Christian nationalist, David Barton.
- [128:05]
Mark Seale
Barton, a 70 year old lifelong resident of Alito, Texas, which is a small town just southwest of Fort Worth, has become a major influence on the Republican Party and its attitudes towards education. Location not just in the Lone Star State, but across the nation. While reporting on the Conservative Political Action Conference for Rolling Stone, I recall being given a copy of one of Barton's books. He calls himself a historian, although his only credential is a bachelor's degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A one time science and math teacher at a Christian academy in his hometown town, Barton plunged into politics in 1988 as a Republican activist with a penchant for homophobia. He declared that homosexuality is as evil as any deed Adolf Hitler committed and said that the lack of cure for AIDS was God's punishment for a wicked community. Quote, your sexual choice is not a God given right, he said on one occasion.
- [129:07]
John Cameron Mitchell
In 1988, Barton founded Wall Builders, a nonprofit, the organization says, dedicated to, quote, educating the nation concerning the godly founding of the nation. Barton believes that Americans have been deceived about the true meaning of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declares, quote, congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion. The founders, Barton claims, only meant that Congress shouldn't pick a particular Protestant denomination as the national faith. Barton also argues that Thomas Jefferson meant that the wall of separation between church and state should operate only in one direction. That the government should not interfere with the religion, but that Christians should dominate the government. As Barton said in an interview.
- [129:56]
Dan
So we've got to get away from being scared to say we're a Christian nation. What we've got to do is define it the right way, define it the historical way. We can't let the left steal 300 years of heritage. We can't let them wipe out 300 court cases, wipe out what dozens of presidents and governors have said simply because.
- [130:12]
Robert Evans
They don't like the term.
- [130:14]
Dan
We are a Christian nation. We have been a Christian nation, and.
- [130:17]
Hayley
That doesn't mean anything.
- [130:19]
Dan
They think it does. We're not theocratic, we're not coercive, we believe in free choice, we don't believe.
- [130:25]
Molly White
In any of the others.
- [130:26]
Dan
And that's what we've got to get back to doing. We don't need to be ashamed at all that we're Christians and that we.
- [130:30]
Hayley
Believe we have a Christian nation.
- [130:32]
Mark Seale
The story is much more complicated than Barton Said says, and he gets the most important details wrong. Most of the generation that led the Revolution and wrote the Constitution agreed with Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, that when church and state mix, both are harmed. Jefferson successfully established separation of church and state in his home state of Virginia in 1786 when it adopted the Statute of Religious Freedom. He authored the First Amendment adopted in 1789, also banned Congress from quote, establishing a religion. And most states embraced to varying degrees the doctrine of church state separation.
- [131:10]
John Cameron Mitchell
There were some states that objected to this notion. The state governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts, for instance, initially interpreted the First Amendment as meaning only Congress could not establish religion, but states could. Citizens of those two states paid taxes that supported the Congregationalist church respectively until 1818 and 1833. For decades, some states had so called Jew laws that prohibited non Christians from holding office or had similar bans on Catholics. Such laws were the exception, however, and fell by the wayside by the end of the 19th century. The 14th amendment adopted in 1868 placed the same limits on state power that are placed on the federal government regarding the establishment of religion, a limitation upheld in the 1947 Supreme Court case Everson vs. Board of Education.
- [132:03]
Mark Seale
Martin has campaigned to overwrite that history with his own alternative narrative. Towards that end, he's collected approximately 100,000 primary documents written before 1812. Based on that selection of material, he argues that American leaders like Washington, Jefferson, Adams and their people peers wanted only Christians to lead the nation and that American law should be based on the Bible.
- [132:28]
John Cameron Mitchell
Barton believes that not just the Bible but also the original United States Constitution, which includes provisions protecting slavery such as the Three Fifths Compromise, were directly inspired by God. He asserts, again with no evidence and without defining terms, that 52 of the 55 signers of the Declaration of Independence were in his words, quote, orthodox or Evangelical Christians. In reality, the early leaders of America didn't speak with one mind regarding religion. Many were deists who saw God not as a deity invested in the daily lives of humans, but as a dispassionate clockmaker who put the gears of the universe together, wound it up and let it run on its own. Their God didn't intervene in history or perform miracle healings at spiritual remains revivals. When Ben Franklin proposed opening the first session of the 1787 Constitutional Convention with a prayer, the proposal was voted down with only four approving Franklin's motion at a gathering that as many as 55 attended on any given day.
- [133:37]
Mark Seale
In their letters, many of the Founding fathers scoffed at the accuracy of the Bible and the reliability of its myriad translations. As John Adams said of the Bible.
- [133:47]
Dan
In an age when fraud, forgery and perjury were considered as lawful means of propagating truth by philosophers, legislators and theologians, what may not be suspected?
- [134:03]
Mark Seale
Benjamin Franklin told his friend Ezra Stiles that Jesus was a wise philosopher, but that he had personal doubts that Christ was the Son of God. Franklin questioned whether the depiction of Christ life or even his teachings as described in the Gospels could be trusted.
- [134:18]
Dan
As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think the system of morals and his religion as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see. But I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes and I have doubt with most of the present dissenters in England as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it.
- [134:48]
Mark Seale
And Thomas Jefferson, who Barton insists believed that the American government should be based on Christian values, was even more blunt about his central Christian belief regarding Jesus and his virgin birth. Jefferson wrote, jesus was a man of.
- [135:04]
Dan
Illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart and an enthusiastic mind who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law.
- [135:21]
John Cameron Mitchell
Barton's books and speeches are filled with misquotes and statements attributed to historical figures that no credible scholars have been able to find. He cherry picks evidence to bolster his claims about the Founders religious belief beliefs. Barton, for instance, made up a story that Jefferson started the practice of holding church services in the US Capitol. More reputable scholars argue that while there's evidence that Jefferson attended one service held at the Capitol building, there's no evidence that he approved them officially. What's more, Jefferson was far from an orthodox Christian or the sort of Christian that dominates conservatism today. He edited and published the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Nazareth, commonly referred to as the Jeffersonian Bible, which is a condensed version of Jesus teachings from the Bible that excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, the resurrection, the raising of the dead, and so on. These sort of facts are the subject of Barton's 2022 New York Times bestseller, ironically titled the Jefferson Lies, exposing the myths you always believed about Thomas Jefferson.
- [136:30]
Mark Seale
For instance, Barton depicted Jefferson as defining the United States as a Christian nation. Here's the real Jefferson in his 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia.
- [136:41]
Dan
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are 20 gods or no gods God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
- [136:59]
Mark Seale
Barton's book on Jefferson went too far for even some of Barton's fellow Christian conservatives. The History News Network website derided the book as, quote, the least credible history book in print. 10 Christian conservative scholars so harshly criticized Barton's book that his publisher withdrew it from circulation because it had, quote, lost confidence in the book's details. Yet in spite of the questions regarding its truthful, another evangelical publishing company eventually released a new version.
- [137:37]
John Cameron Mitchell
In spite of his flexible relationship with the truth, Barton is a major player in Republican Party politics. On a podcast, Barton claimed that Republican U.S. house Speaker Mike Johnson consulted with him about statistics staffing at the Capitol. Johnson made a speech at a Wall Builders event telling the audience that the theocratic evangelist had, quote, a profound influence on me, my work, my life and everything I do.
- [138:01]
Mark Seale
Because of Barton's influence, the state of Texas recently okayed public schools teaching Bible stories to kindergarten children. Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and Trump's choice to be ambassador to Israel, Mike Huck Huckabee owns the company that designed those lesson plans.
- [138:19]
John Cameron Mitchell
Huckabee has long produced so called history videos for school children that promote Christian nationalism and the idea that United States has a unique relationship with God, such as a series aimed at older children called One Nation Under God, which portrays a Revolutionary War soldier and George Washington suggesting God was on their side.
- [138:39]
Nathan King
We will bring the plagues upon our.
- [138:41]
Robert Evans
British oppressors just as Moses did in.
- [138:44]
Nathan King
Ancient Egypt and we will win the same freedom.
- [138:49]
John Cameron Mitchell
We fight for the idea that we.
- [138:51]
Dan
Can make something great here.
- [138:53]
Molly White
God's spirit compels us forward and the.
- [138:56]
Dan
Time to fight is upon us.
- [139:00]
Mark Seale
This video series may not be shown to kindergarteners in Texas, but the lessons in the Huckabee design curriculum clearly favor a Christian world at the expense of other religions. The scripture filled lessons are not required by state law, but the state will reward school districts with extra tax dollars per student for teaching Huckabee's product. This is an attractive offer to the many school districts in Texas that are currently filing deficit budgets and struggling to raise revenue.
- [139:27]
John Cameron Mitchell
Meanwhile, Barton's political and cultural influence has grown exponentially over the last decade. One of his political action committees played a major role role in getting Ted Cruz elected to the United States Senate. He is close allies with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who wields power typically held by governors in other states. Patrick said this at a 2022 Conservative Political Action convention in Dallas about who he thinks wrote the U.S. constitution.
- [139:56]
Nathan King
We were a nation founded upon not.
- [139:58]
Robert Evans
The words of our founders but the words of God.
- [140:00]
Nathan King
Because he wrote the Constitution institution, He empowered them.
- [140:05]
Dan
We were a Christian state and we've.
- [140:07]
Mark Seale
Been blessed because of that for so many years. In 2010, the Texas State School Board for the first time required that textbook publishers portray a particular biblical figure as an honorary Founding Father. This supposed founder was famously portrayed in the 1956 box office smash by Charlton Heston, who later served as a five term president of the National Rifle Association.
- [140:34]
Robert Evans
Woe unto thee, O Israel.
- [140:38]
Dan
You have sinned a great sin in.
- [140:40]
Robert Evans
The sight of God.
- [140:43]
Dan
You are not worthy to receive these 10 Commandments.
- [140:48]
John Cameron Mitchell
In Texas, regardless of a lack of evidence, textbook publishers are required to tell students that Moses, the prophet depicted in Judeo Christian Scripture as well as the Quran as leading the Hebrews out of slavery, was a major influence on the authors of the Constitution. Furthermore, under Barton's influence, the state of Louisiana enacted a law in June 2024 which requires every public school classroom in the state to prominently display a version of the Ten Commandments from the Book of Exodus, derived from Protestant translations of the Bible. This past November, a federal court issued an injunction barring enforcement of the the law.
- [141:27]
Mark Seale
With Barton's encouragement, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick fought to get a similar bill passed in Texas that would have required every classroom to feature a display of the Ten Commandments at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall and, as the law put it, quote in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom. The bill passed the state Senate with unanimous Republican support, but died when it didn't come before the Texas House in time for a legislative deadline. As KVUE in Austin reported, Patrick has vowed to continue his crusade in the coming months.
- [142:03]
Nathan King
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick resurrecting a bill to force public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. That bill was originally proposed during last year's legislative session, but missed a key deadline and died in the House. Louisiana just passed a similar law this week. The Lieutenant Governor posting on X saying, quote, texas would have and should have been the first state in the nation to put the Ten Commandments back in our schools, end quote. The Lieutenant Governor says he will pass the bill during the next legislative session.
- [142:38]
Mark Seale
Under the Ten Commandments bill, moral codes from other major world religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would not be posted in classes classrooms. Presenting a clear case of a state government violating the First Amendment, Princeton historian Kevin Cruz explained why such laws, like those signed by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, ignore the United States Constitution.
- [143:00]
Nathan King
There are three references to religion in the Constitution and all three are ones that keep religion at arm's length away from the state. There is no religious test required for office standards. A remarkable, remarkable revolutionary act at the time. The First Amendment says there will be no national religion established by the national government, says that we will not interfere.
- [143:21]
John Cameron Mitchell
With your private right to worship or.
- [143:23]
Nathan King
Not worship as you see fit.
- [143:24]
Dan
Right?
- [143:24]
Nathan King
That is what the Constitution says. And so Landry says he wanted to put this up because Moses was the first lawgiver.
- [143:30]
Dan
He's not.
- [143:31]
Nathan King
The Code of Hammurabi predates Moses by.
- [143:34]
Dan
Four centuries or something.
- [143:36]
Nathan King
But also, if you want to look.
- [143:37]
Robert Evans
At the real law of the land.
- [143:39]
Nathan King
Put the Constitution up on those walls. Let students read what the real law of this country has to say about.
- [143:45]
Molly White
The proper role of religion in politics.
- [143:48]
John Cameron Mitchell
The history of posting 10 commandment signs or plaques or building such monuments in public spaces over the last 70 years has an origin that might shock many right wing cultural warriors who associate Hollywood with godless liberalism. As Cruz points out in his book One Nation Under God How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the 3 hour 40 minute epic movie the Ten Commandments was a monster hit and wowed audiences with its 25,000 member cast and advanced special effects. When it was released in 1956, the movie grossed more than $85 million. The film's politically conservative subtext was unmistakable. The director, Cecil B. DeMille, hated the New Deal and testified to the House UN American Activities Committee that Communists exercised malign influence over unions, including those in Hollywood, that drove up the cost of filmmaking.
- [144:45]
Mark Seale
The film can be read as a metaphor about the Cold War with the oppressive Egyptians representing the Soviet Union and the freedom loving Hebrews standing in for the United States. At the beginning of the movie, DeMille appears and calls the movie, quote, the story of the birth of freedom, the story of Moses. The movie also captures the racism and ironically the anti Semitism of a country that had not yet emerged from McCarthyism. The historian Alan Naddell tells a revealing story of two cast members in the Ten Commandments. According to the story, during the film's production, Charlton Heston's wife became pregnant. DeMille then told Heston that if his wife gave birth to a boy boy, the child would be cast as the baby Moses. When Heston's wife gave birth to a son, DeMille sent her a telegram saying, congratulations, he's got the part.
- [145:35]
John Cameron Mitchell
Meanwhile, an adult actor, Woody Strode, appeared in the film in two markedly different roles. A former NFL star who broke the 13 year informal NFL ban on African American players when he signed with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, Stroh played both an Ethiopian king and the enslaved attended of Moses adopted Egyptian mother. DeMille thought that the audiences could tell whether swaddled white baby was a boy or a girl, but apparently assumed they wouldn't notice a black actor playing both a king and a slave because of the racist belief that all black people look alike. Meanwhile, a movie set in ancient Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula featured an almost entirely light skinned king cast, even though DeMille's mother was Jewish. The only Jewish actor to play a major role was Edward G. Robinson, who earlier became famous playing gangsters. And he won DeMille's favor, perhaps because he was a friendly witness before the House UN American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunts. Thus, the one prominent Jewish face in the Ten Commandments was cast as a bad guy, a Hebrew named Nathan, who continually tries to undermine Moses and convince the escaped slaves to return to their Egyptian masters.
- [146:51]
Dan
We're gathered against you, Moses.
- [146:54]
James Stout
You take too much upon yourself. We will not live by your commandments.
- [146:58]
Dan
We are free. There is no freedom without the law.
- [147:04]
James Stout
Whose law is yours?
- [147:06]
Robert Evans
Did you carve those tablets to become.
- [147:08]
James Stout
A prince over us?
- [147:11]
Mark Seale
As Cruz died documents when the Ten Commandments film was initially released, DeMille came up with an ingenious marketing strategy. He teamed up with a conservative anti communist organization, the Fraternal Order of the eagles, to establish 10 commandment monuments across the country. Around the time that Southern states erected new Confederate monuments To protest desegregation, 10 commandment monuments appeared at the county courthouse in Evansville, Indiana, the Milwaukee City hall and near the US Canadian border in North Dakota. Nearly 150 such monuments were erected across the country. Momentum stalled during the civil rights era to the extent that An Alabama State justice, Roy Moore suffered ridicule when he placed without authorization a self funded 5,280 pound monument in the rotunda of a judicial building housing the state's Supreme Court. In 2001, the monument was ordered removed two years later. Later but once, fringe figures like Moore have moved closer to the American political mainstream because of the influence of people like Barton, Lt. Governor Patrick and their allies.
- [148:17]
John Cameron Mitchell
The contemporary obsession with festooning public spaces with religious artifacts has as much to do with malevolent nostalgia as with religious zeal. Men like anti CRT crusader Christopher Ruffo, along with Barton and Patrick Patrick want to return to the world that made the Ten Commandments film. A world in which white people are centered, the accomplishments of dark skinned people are erased or expropriated, and where America stands as an untainted beacon of freedom in spite of its history of enslavement, imperialism and genocide. And now, once again, advocates of historical amnesia have a friend in the White House.
- [148:59]
Dan
The time has come to reclaim our once great educational and institutions from the radical left.
- [149:04]
Robert Evans
And we will do that.
- [149:05]
Dan
Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. It's called accreditation for a reason. The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally. When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become democratic, dominated by Marxists, maniacs and lunatics.
- [149:32]
Mark Seale
On January 29th of this year, Trump issued an executive order mandating the withdrawal of federal dollars from any public school that allegedly imprints, quote, anti American, subversive, harmful and false ideologies on our nation's children. This could include teaching them about transgender identity, providing services to trans students, or educating students about America's long bloody promotion of white supremacy, homophobia or transphobia. The order also requires public schools to provide, quote, unquote patriotic education. Those like Trump, Barton and others who have clamored the loudest about schools as centers of indoctrination are now imposing their own form of propaganda, returning history classes from kindergarten to graduate school schools to the days of the 1920s and the 1930s when textbook writers praised fascist dictators for keeping unions in their place. And those willing to die to end slavery were painted as the bad guys.
- [150:32]
John Cameron Mitchell
In the civil rights era. Black and brown parents boycotted public schools that discriminated to undermine their funding, created their own freedom schools that provided lessons in black and brown history, and marched against the old Jim Crow law laws. Parents who want their children to receive an honest accounting of the nation's past will do well to learn from these predecessors and to disrupt the meetings of right wing school boards as loudly and enthusiastically as the parents who were conned to a frenzy about the phantom dangers of crt.
- [151:04]
Mark Seale
This is Michael Phillips and this is Steven Monticelli. Thanks to Betsy Frioff for reading passages from textbooks and to Dan Glass for reading quotes from the Founding Fathers. Of course, thanks to you for listening.
- [151:35]
American Express Representative
With the American Express Gold Card, I.
- [151:37]
Molly White
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American Express Representative
So with all these groceries, I'm also getting points. Learn more@americanexpress.com US Explore Gold Terms and.
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Molly White
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Hayley
Be keeping you from being distracted, here's.
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Molly White
Something to level up your focus. I'm Amantha Imber, host of the podcast How I Work.
- [152:00]
Hayley
It's a show where I interview some.
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Molly White
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Hayley
Search for How I work on the free iHeart app or in whatever podcast.
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Molly White
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- [152:29]
Dan
Hey everybody, welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is Robert Evans and I have an episode for you. It's also an article I wrote for our substack Shatterzone, so I'm just going to get into that. Since February 5, 2025, a document has been circulating among Democratic Party staffers and liberal think tank experts warning about Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley led coup to end US Democracy. The document is titled the Imminent Neoreactionary Threat to the American Republic. It opens with a statement that the brief was, quote, iteratively and collectively compiled by a broad, bipartisan and decentralized network of experts who wish to remain anonymous due to concerns about being targeted. The full document is here. The table of contents is split into three main areas. 1 the new shape of threats to the American republic 2 Understanding recent events in the context of threats to the American Republic and and three A list of appendices. The title of the actual file when I received it was Evidence Brief for Journalists and the introduction describes its aim as, quote, explaining the nature of the current political crisis to journalists who are attempting to inform the public. However, I spoke with two sources who are members of these groups and received the document. They told me that to their knowledge, the document was not mostly spread to journalists, but instead among networks of think tank employees and DNC staff. People you might refer to broadly as policy wonks. One source I interviewed explained it is a thing for think tanks to frame overviews for laypeople as briefs for journalists or Congress. See the IPCC reports. Part of me thinks the framing for journalists is just a shortcut, for this is somewhat specialized knowledge broken down. The paper opens by acknowledging the scope of the executive power grab being perpetuated under President Trump and the destabilization wrought by Elon Musk and his Doge team. It then notes the threat is an order of magnitude beyond just a presidential power grab. It states that Musk is tied to a broader group of Silicon Valley tech elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. Curtis Yarvin is labeled as a thought leader in this group called the Neo Reactionaries. I'll stop here to note that this summary is accurate enough for mass consumption, but I have some issues with it. Musk probably would not label himself a neoreactionary, and he doesn't have much of a history with Yarvin. Peter Thiel does, but it's more a relationship of patronage than mutual influence. It would be more accurate to say that Thiel and Andresen find Yarvin useful because of his success in spreading to a lot of young techie kids the idea that tech CEOs should run the world. Musk, I feel, has largely jumped on this bandwagon with the Neo reaction because those tech kids are useful foot soldiers. Yarvin's ideas about retiring all government employees and destroying the independent media and academia are convenient for Musk's own ambitions. This context may be unnecessary for explaining the overall danger of the neoreactionaries and Musk to regular people, but I also think it's a mistake to credit Yarvin with more power than he holds. The document refers to him as the leader of the neoreactionary movement movement, and I think that gets across kind of the wrong idea about how all of this works. That said, the document does do a pretty good job of summing up the threat that we face. Quote the Neo reactionaries have openly stated their aims to destroy the nation state and the constitutional order and replace them with a newly privately owned corporate state to be run by a CEO dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state, state slaves in Yarvin's terms, because everything rots when it has no owner, human beings included. That last quote is also one of Yarvin's from here, the document argues that Musk and his team are attempting to bring about this dystopia by taking over the quote nervous system of the state. Another Yarvin quote, these would be the data and communication systems that Doge is trying to centralize in its unaccountable hands. Hands. Next, the authors of this document make a call to action. Quote, the most dramatic reversals of democratic breakdown 1977 India 2022 Brazil 2023 Poland have been accomplished by radically large tent cross ideological coalitions with little in common except a desire for the continuation of a constitutional order. Evidence suggests that the present threat to American democracy is dire enough that such a broad tent approach focused on Musk and his associates may be replaced required and I think this is the most interesting and hopeful part of the whole document for me. For one thing, I believe it does accurately state what's needed in the present moment a popular front against autocracy and dictatorship. I would add to their list of relevant examples of popular fronts, the original, which is France from 1934 to 1938. So it's heartening to see evidence that this understanding has started to grow within DNC policy circles and the people around around them. The source who sent me this document in the first place described themselves as a member of, quote, a few unofficial networks of climate activists who are high ranking in the government and policy think tank circles. They noted that these are normally, quote, very milquetoast lib spaces, but quote, they're being radicalized rapidly. Both sources I interviewed for this requested anonymity. The second person I talked to with gave an explicit reason. They stated, quote, I've suspected for a while a lot more things in DNC stuff was compromised than people were comfortable with. In other words, they believe the Republican Party has spies within the DNC and people they know have made statements to that effect. They were worried that these, quote, GOP moles might reveal their identity, but more so, they were worried that these moles might have planted the document itself and put false information inside it with the goal of provoking a reaction from Democrats that would be useful political politically to Republicans. I do think this caveat is worthwhile. It's certainly not impossible. And I think the frank admission that the DNC likely has Republican spies inside it is also really worth stating. But I should note that when it comes to the actual accuracy of this document, I don't really see much to take issue with. I've spent more time than most people studying Curtis Yarvin and the neo reactionaries. I would not describe myself as a top expert expert in the matter, but I do have a good base of knowledge here and nothing that I've read in this document struck me as obviously false or incorrect, nor did the overall tone seem hysteric or unreasonable. So I asked my sources if over the last month they'd seen more people talking about Yarvin in their daily lives within sort of the circles that they work in and around, because again, they communicate with a lot of DNC staffers and politicians. They said, respectively no and quote, that's kind of one of the odd things, to be frank. This guy Yarvin is being brought to big events in dc. He's been referenced by Bannon and Vance. I have heard his talking points come from Republican mouths, but he's largely not tracked. That concern comports with some of fears that I had late last year about Yarvin and the neo reactionaries. Namely, I had believed for some time that Yarvin and the people kind of aligned with him. Largely. A lot of these Silicon Valley folks with money had become much more influential among Trump and his tight inner circle than was widely understood at the time. Ultimately, I wrote and researched two episodes of behind the Bastards because I thought it was valuable to bring more attention to the subject. I really had kind of a gut feeling that this was going to become much more relevant very soon, which is why I picked it as the topic for the episode we did with Ed Helms, who's by a pretty good margin, the biggest celebrity we've had on the show so far. And I hope that that would help kind of get we were talking about out to a wider audience. And it did. The episodes did very well. I think between YouTube and our downloads and the podcast, we're probably at something like a million listens for them at this point. But our listener base is a mix of leftists and progressive liberals, right? Their interests are not representative of the Democratic Party at large. It is noteworthy and perhaps even important that influential individuals in the policy space with connections to Democratic politicians and the D Agency as an organization have started a grassroots effort to spread the word about Yarvin as a threat. And that's what this document represents. It's even more noteworthy that this document is unsparing about the danger and the fact that a clock is currently ticking over all of our heads. Here's another if non governmental actors, by which we mean unelected, unratified, unvetted, untrained, unconstrained and or unaccountable actors, gain access to key digital infrastructure structure, they could seize control of critical functions of government in ways that will be difficult or impossible to reverse. And speaking of things that can't be reversed. My love for our sponsors. We're back. So to continue from this document, there's a section next titled National Security. And the focus shifts from Yarvin and his neo reactionaries to Musk, who it claims, quote, poses a uniquely significant security risk. This, in its argument, is because Musk and Doge espouse, quote, anti constitutional ideologies and, quote, are under the influence of America's principal foreign adversaries, China and Russia. It goes on at some length about Musk's foreign business interests and how they might compromise. Compromise him. Now, I don't disagree that Musk is compromised, but I see his actions as very much consistent with those of a man seizing power for himself. I do understand why people speaking to an audience that is largely, you know, when it's bipartisan, it's folks who are kind of more on the centrist side of things in the policy space and otherwise largely a lot of, like Democratic Party employees and politicians. I understand why you focus on the China and Russia approach it all with them, but when it comes to both accurately stating the threat and getting a lot of people to care, I really don't think that's the right strategy to take. I think it's an issue to focus popular messaging around how this all empowers America's principal foreign adversaries, because most Americans don't really think that way or particularly care about that. And beyond that, the larger issue is that the primary adversary Musk has empowered is not, in fact, the Russian or Chinese governments. It's himself. And he personally, as an individual, is currently a greater threat to every citizen of the United States than any foreign government. I think that's undeniable, and I think, again, it's an error not to frame it that way. The next section of the paper lays out the definition of a coup. Quote, in essence, a coup is a number one, rapid seizure of state power by unelected actors who acquire that power by two, seizing critical government infrastructure, and three, weaponizing it to neutralize legitimate government actors efforts to stop them. The unelected actors then use this power to four, remake the rules of the political game in a way that cannot easily be checked or undone through democratic processes. Now, it argues convincingly that all four of these steps are underway. Now, one thing I found compelling is the way at which this document recognizes the threat that cryptocurrency represents right now and how it can and will be used by the new regime to cement their power in ways that sidestep the present legal system, quote, without canceling elections for example, cryptocurrency can be used to create informal but powerful new levers of political influence. Politicians can sell personal coins to unknown buyers who vote on public policy on the basis of their shareholder power shielded from public view. I think that's a real thing to be concerned with, and I also think it's very clearly part of the goal of this project. Project. Now, next we have a summary of the neo reactionary agenda, which lists some additional names among the Silicon Valley elite currently championing an overthrow of democracy. These include David Sachs, Blaji Srinivasan and JD Vance. Also name dropped is a political theorist named Nick Land, who was in fact referenced twice in this paper. He is quoted directly as having said in his paper the Dark Enlightenment quote. For the hardcore neo reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. Land has had a huge impact on a lot of these guys, although he's not really a Yarvin like figure, as in he's not this kind of guy who sees himself as, or I think really wants to be, a shadowy puppet master orchestrating the overthrow of democracy from behind the scenes. He's really someone stating what he believes to be kind of inevitable concepts and realities about our present historical moments. Moment that happened to comport with a lot of the things that these guys believe. Now, the authors next lay out Yarvin's concept of the butterfly revolution, which is based on an essay he wrote in 2022 in which he laid out how a full reboot of the US Government could be accomplished. Quote, Yarvin's seven part butterfly revolution has been roughly summarized as follows. Number one, have Trump run for president on the platform of getting rid of an efficient system. Number two, once he wins, purge the bureaucracy, rage, retire all government employees. Number three, ignore the courts through declaring states of emergency. Number four, co opt Congress. Number five, centralize the police. Federalize the National Guard, create a national police force that absorbs local ones. Number six, shut down the elites, the media and the universities who make up the cathedral. Number seven, get people on the streets whenever there is any obstruction by a government agency. And obviously all of that we've seen Trump and his people make moves towards in the last couple of weeks, right? And that's in fact what the next chunk of the document is. Subsequent pages summarize the first days of the Trump administration and Doge activity and they show how it comports with the butterfly revolution blueprint. Now, we've all lived that in real time, so I'm not going to summarize their arguments here. So the document ends with a section on actions and rhetoric to walk watch. Those are listed as quote, government contracts which fund many of Musk's companies at present and the next is Greenland and Mars. Quote, A core tenet of neoreactionary ideology is the replacement of nation states with network states. But states require territory. Technocracy Inc. A predecessor to the NeoReactionary movement whose one time director was Elon Musk's grandfather, proposed a North American tech technate where the entire continent of North America would be united under one technocratic super state. There is currently a Peter Thiel backed network state project called Praxis in Greenland. Musk's public statements about colonizing Mars can also be read as part of a territorial project. Lastly, it lists crypto, which the authors primarily seem to fear as a method of deniably bribing Trump. Now I think most of this is pretty credible, although I feel differently about Musk's talk about colonizing Mars. I think that's been more about PR than anything. I do think there's a good chance he's just delusional enough to think that that's something feasible on any kind of close in time frame that we start building persistent colonies on Mars. I think the science suggests that if that ever happens it won't be anytime soon, and I think he knows that. I think he's largely understanding hype well and how to use it, and Mars has been an easy way for him to do that over the years. Overall, I'd say the document is fairly thorough in its layout of the neoreactionary ecosystem and the actual plan currently being acted to end US democracy. It includes a section that lists several of the earliest known Doge employees, and it quotes extensively from Yarvin and somewhat less extensively from Land. The paper's ultimate conclusion is that Musk is using this moment to turn himself into the kind of unitary, all powerful executive that Yarvin longs for. This is an executive who rules alongside a largely ceremonial president, as well as courts and a legislative system that are equally ceremonial. After laying out the bulk of the actual threat, the article promises that, quote, Section 3 articulates what Congress and other actors can do in order to stop this threat. However, the document in its present form does not include any section 3 or any comprehensive list of solutions Congress and other actors might carry out in order to stop the present assault on democracy. And perhaps there's a later version of the document that I don't have access to that includes that perhaps this is just a statement that wasn't edited out. I have to say, as heartening as I find the way in which this document talks about the threat that we're facing and the fact that I think it's overall good, good that people in positions of influence around the DNC are talking about this stuff, it's also kind of perfect that at the end they're like, hey, you know, don't worry, we've included some tips on how to defeat these guys. And then they just don't. You know, if the situation weren't so dire, it would be a lot funnier, but unfortunately it is pretty dire. Now, if you want to take a look at the full document itself, it's quite a bit longer than what I've read to you now, but it is really worth reading, especially, especially if you have been hearing about this Curtis Yarvin guy or the Neo reactionaries and you kind of want to know how this all fits together with what Musk is doing. In more detail. If you go to my substack at Shatterzone, the most recent article is the text of this and I include a couple of different points links to the full document which I have uploaded to scribd and you can read the whole thing if you want. It has not been altered since I have read received it. And again, yeah, I think it's. It's worth getting out there and spreading to more people. So that's the episode. We will be back tomorrow with something else. Until then, folks, I don't know. Keep an eye on this. Bye.
- [171:25]
Hayley
This is It Could Happen Here. Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House.
- [171:32]
Dan
Yes, the.
- [171:33]
Hayley
The crumbling world and what it means for. For me and you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout and Robert. Yes, this week we're covering the week of February 19th to February 26th.
- [171:45]
Dan
And boy, if you thought we had Ed before, do we have Ed now?
- [171:51]
James Stout
We still haven't got that him sponsorship, but we'll be trying.
- [171:54]
Dan
We're gonna keep working at it. I'm also looking to get us a penis pump sponsorship. Speaking of penis pumps, let's talk about the Germans. So Germany had its election very recently after their most recent coalition collapsed. The way their government works is that periodically governments can't continue being governments and so they have to have a very sudden election. I'm not going to explain it much more than that, but the, the actual results of the election were pretty interesting, right? The primary winner was off day AFD Alternative for Germany would be kind of the closest English translation of the name of the party. This is a far right party. It is primarily, primarily popular in East Germany now, but it has surged massively after years and years of being decidedly on the political fringe. One of the reasons it has always been on the political fringe is that German parties, both centrists, conservatives and the left, have had a tacit agreement since the end of World War II called the cordon Sanitation. It's not just Germany. This is a thing that used to be present in all of Europe. And basically the gist of the Cordon Sanitaire is you don't form a coalition because these are parliamentary democracies. Right. So usually no one party has 50% or more of the vote. So you have a party with 20 and a party with 15 and a party with 8, and they form a coalition government. And the norm for up until now, and thankfully is still the normal. We'll talk about that, is that you don't coalition coalition with AfD, which is a part of why that and kind of lingering stigma about the Nazis kept them from being a major force in German politics until, you know, over the last eight or so years, they have grown substantially to the point where in this recent election, they doubled their support from around 10% to a little over 20%. Yeah, this makes them. They're not the largest just single block in the German, in the Reichstag.
- [174:04]
Hayley
They're number two though, right?
- [174:05]
Dan
They are number two, I believe, which sucks.
- [174:08]
James Stout
Yeah, it's not great.
- [174:09]
Dan
Yeah. The CDU is, is still significantly larger.
- [174:14]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [174:14]
Dan
Although not like overwhelmingly larger, to be clear. So basically right now the cdu, which is the centrist party, and it's kind of like center right, a little center right, has 208 seats in the Reichstag, AfD has 150 to the Social Democrats have 120, the Greens have 85 and the Left Party has 64. So AfD is a minority in the government compared to all of the people who didn't vote for AfD. But the rate at which they're increasing is a serious problem, especially since most Germans list immigration as their primary voting concern right. Now. This most recent election had unusual, usually high voter turnout. 2021 election, 76% of the country or so voted. More than 82% of the country voted in this most recent election. So the fact that like, you have record high turnout and AfD doubling its support is deeply chilling. Now, it's not 100% bad news, because one of the other stories here is the new left Party. Well, not super new, but the left party, which is kind of came out of East Germany's Communist Party, massively increased their support too. And they actually for the first time like very significantly increased their share of the vote, which had been under this kind of 5% threshold before and is now at about 8.8%. So they went up by an amount. Actually. It's not like as much as AFD went up, but like in terms of a percentage of their priority vote, it's a similar increase. So there's another party that had significant gains in this and it's a, it's kind of a newer party called the bsw, which is, I, you could say they do a little bit of like a red brown alliance kind of thing where there's some like left wing messaging in what they're saying, but they're also like super anti immigrant and they're not, you know, it's not kind of like to the extent that the AfD is, but when they came onto the scene, they were expected by some people to pull votes away from the AfD this election. And that's really not what happened. And in fact a lot of the votes they pulled were from Social Democrats and the left parties. So that was one of the, you know, it's because of the way the parliamentary system works, which is more rational than our system. This didn't like hand the whole election to after. Again, this is the benefit of a system like the Germans had, which is pretty explicitly set up to make it a lot harder for a right wing dictator to get in again. But it is interesting to me that that kind of messaging, I mean, it's further kind of evidence of what's been happening everywhere, which is when your party positions itself to try to win over far right votes, votes by, by kind of mixing in. Well, okay, what if we did some sort of, you know, liberal lefty policies, but we also got really racist? Yeah, you don't take votes from the far right, but you do wind up pulling the worst people from the left.
- [177:27]
Hayley
Yeah.
- [177:28]
Dan
And yeah, I, I guess that's kind of like the broad strokes now. Like this is bad, although it's also not comprehensively a nightmare. One of the things that's kind of pot, I don't know, positive, may not be the right babe. But interesting to me is if you looked at the 2021 election maps of the strongest party by constituency in the 2021 election, and I found a good article, German election results explained in graphics on dw.com if you just Google that, you'll find it in 2021 off day. Obviously, like the whole northeast was, you know, their territory, but they also had strong inroads into the northeast west parts of the country. Right. You know, primarily like rural areas and the like. But like there was a, there was a lot of red on that map in the northwest portion of Germany in the new election that's all black, which is the cdu. Right. Which means while of days representation in the Reichstag and like number of voters increased substantially, their geographical reach has been kind of cauterized.
- [178:37]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [178:38]
Dan
Would be a fair way of saying it. Which is, which is interesting to me. Hard to say too much. Like, does that mean, you know, I think some of what has happened here because it's important both to note that this is bad, it's bad that the Nazis doubled their share of the vote, but also it was expected to be a little worse than it was. You know, there's some evidence that after JD Vance made his speech introducing AfD, their polling started to like freeze a little, little bit. And it may be the fact, because a lot of older voters came in and they, they seem to have primarily gone with the CDU with this sort of center right party. So it's. One story here is you could maybe look at it as a lot of older, more conservative Germans who are also old enough to really not like the idea of the AfD came out and voted for, you know, the center right party in order to kind of cut off their, their power. The other thing though, that's kind of a lot less optimistic is that AFD is most popular among people under 30 who widely don't view it as an extremist party, which is deeply, deeply concerning.
- [179:49]
Hayley
And AfD won the majority of like working class unemployed and male votes.
- [179:54]
Dan
Yes. Yes.
- [179:55]
Hayley
Pretty substantially.
- [179:56]
John Cameron Mitchell
Yeah.
- [179:57]
Dan
Yes. They did extremely well with young men and unemployed young men in particular. And that's, that's all deeply concerning. So, you know, there's a few things going on here, all of which are very interesting to me, but the power of day continues to have with younger, really young Germans is frightening. That said, there's also some evidence here that the situation in the United States has galvanized a chunk of the German voting populace to attempt to stop off day. And kind of one of the positive things that came out is prior to this election there was a lot of talk about whether or not the CDU would choose to coalition with the AfD and thus end the court and sanitaire. And to make a long story short, they're not going to do that, they're looking to coalition with the Social Democrats, which is a good thing. You know, it doesn't mean no one will do that in the future. And unfortunately, a majority of German voters suspect AfD will be in a coalition by 2030, but it hasn't happened yet. And that's as good as things get right now. And that's what I got to say about Germany.
- [181:07]
Hayley
Yeah, I mean, and people frame these results as like, slightly better than expected.
- [181:11]
Dan
Slightly.
- [181:11]
Hayley
Previous polling showed AfD being, being slightly better in results, and that dipped for Vance and Musk. Started, started really trying to push a, both in person and digitally. So you saw a slight dip there.
- [181:28]
Dan
Yes. And this is the other thing that's kind of worth noting. That kind of like Red Brown Party, in addition to being kind of pro social programs, anti immigration, they're also very anti United States. Okay, so that may explain some of that too.
- [181:48]
James Stout
Yeah, it does seem like things are changing a lot. And one of the things that we've seen, like as we spoke about before, like, not just in Germany, but in Canada, was that like, people hate Musk and Trump so much in the rest of the world that like, their endorsement could be something of a kiss of death electorally.
- [182:04]
Hayley
Yeah, yeah. Like the Conservative Party in Canada has been growing pretty exponentially in terms of like, popular support the past few years as the Liberals have like, tanked. And now those trends have actually started to reverse. The Canadian Liberal polling is up 10 points. The Conservative polling is down. Conservatives might not even be able to control Parliament in the next election as they were like, expected to. And it'll be interesting to see like, if this, if this anti, like, far right United States trend continues to more countries beyond like Germany and Canada. But I'm still, I'm still eagerly, eagerly waiting for the next Canadian election.
- [182:38]
Dan
And this is part of the story that is really interesting right now where we've talked a lot about the transnational fascist coalition. You know, the fact that Trump and his people have had the quasi dictator of Hungary, you know, over at Mar a Lago, and have repeatedly cited him as an inspiration for how to take and centralize power. You know, how close Bolsonaro was in the last Trump administration. Like, you know, obviously the Republican Party's increasing closeness and embrace of Putin's Russia. But what also is happening right now is, is people, like countries that had been heading in a very, in a more authoritarian right wing direction, turning around in part due to the war in Ukraine and turning away from kind of the international right wing movement as Poland being the best example, right. Where Poland. Polish politics have changed substantially in the last several years. And a big part of that is the war in Ukraine. And a lot, there are a lot of Poles who I think otherwise would have been more on board for a lot of the socially conservative shit who are like, well, but all these fuckers are pro Russia and we're Poland. Like, no.
- [183:54]
Hayley
All right, let's go on a break and return to talk more about the crumbling world and usade.
- [184:01]
James Stout
Yeah.
- [184:08]
Robert Evans
Foreign.
- [184:15]
Hayley
We are back. I'm gonna throw to James to to do a segment on usaid.
- [184:21]
James Stout
Yeah, we are back. And before I talk about usaid, I do want to talk about something else that has been advertised along with whatever products and services support this show and that is the gold card. So the gold card, if you're not familiar, is something that Trump floated this week to replace the EB5 investor, a visa. Trump suggested that the gold card, it would require a $5 million investment. Investment. I think it's just a charge, right? It's you're just giving the money to the United States government and in return you will receive a green card plus privileges and it will be not a green but a gold card. So that's great. That is the EB5 visa, if you're not familiar, required you. Since 2022, it's been $1,050,000 investment and the creation of 10 jobs. So it had some kind of like trickle down economics is not a real thing. It's a lie that they tell you. But it had some idea that these rich people would create jobs in the U.S. people who are less wealthy. The gold card seems to not have that. You just have to be rich. Right. So that's an interesting change to the immigration system. The other thing I want to talk about today is the United States Agency for International Development, better known as usaid. It's been a target of like the anti woke, right. For some time because they fundamentally don't understand what Joseph Nye would have called soft power. Right. Their power to persuade. The power to influence outcomes around the world with things other than tanks and bombs.
- [185:51]
Dan
Oh, and again, if your power is soft right now, you might consider trying hims or one of our other sponsors.
- [186:00]
Hayley
Kim's is not a sponsor.
- [186:02]
Dan
Sorry, James, we needed to do that.
- [186:04]
James Stout
But I have been diverted. But I'm returning to my topic. The agency has been massively impacted by Doge and Trump administration cuts. Right. The Trump administration suspended all foreign aid in January via executive order on 20 January in order to assess if it was serving US interests. The state Department then issued guidance that seemed to go beyond the executive order and cut nearly basically all USAID expensive on the 13th of this month. That's February, if you're listening. Later, a judge issued a temporary restraining order. This TRO didn't really stop them from doing what they were doing because it told them to continue with existing contracts. And what the State Department claims that it's doing is implementing clauses that are already in the contract. So the contracts will have some kind of kill clause.
- [186:54]
Dan
Right.
- [186:55]
James Stout
And they claim that they're implementing, so they think they've found a fun workaround. Rather than talking extensively about court battles, I want to talk about what this means. These are cuts made by the richest man in the world that have had a direct, tangible and devastating impact on the poorest people on the planet. In Sudan, 80% of emergency kitchens have been closed. That means that close to 2 million people will go without food. Local groups organize. The kitchens are running out of money. The way this works is that even when Rubio issued a communication talking about continuing food aid, it's unclear exactly what that means because in this case and in other cases, USAID is sending them money in order to provision themselves locally as opposed to sending them food as an in kind donation. Right. Whatever he communicated, these people are not getting food. And as a result, the people who run these mutual aid kitchens, it's a mutual aid CO coalition of Sudan, are facing the horrible decision of having to turn people away or deciding who to feed, which is pretty bad. On the border between Thailand and Myanmar, a place where Robert and I have been to report I've heard that people are having babies right now outside lock clinics and life support machines have been removed. Right. So people who were relying on those life support machines, obviously.
- [188:16]
Dan
And at least one person has died.
- [188:18]
James Stout
Yeah. And I'm sure many, many more people than that have died.
- [188:21]
Dan
Yeah, I mean, that's just what's reported. Like, it's a lot of most of what happens there does not get out.
- [188:27]
James Stout
Yeah. I will try in not too long to be there and report on that, but it's pretty devastating right now. Robert and I have met the people who run some of these clinics and they are some of the most incredible people doing amazing work. And yeah, they relied on USAID funding, as lots of other places do, and that's not happening now. The State Department has exempted, quote, life saving humanitarian assistance programs from the cuts, but no one really knows what that means. Right. The order reads, quote, life saving humanitarian assistance applies to core life saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance. As I mentioned before, the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition was receiving financial assistance to help it provision itself, which is much better than the US Going through all the infrastructure spending of being able to deliver that aid itself or through USAID contractors. Other contractors, implementing partners of USAID are still owed money for work that they completed before January, before the Stop Work order stopped payment to them for work to begin again on any of these contracts, they need the contract officer to sign off on it. And it's a little unclear exactly how many of these contract officers are still employed at USA AID because of the federal employment cuts. So essentially USAID has stopped all over the world. In addition to this, in this country, $490 million worth of U.S. grown food, which is in the USAID pipeline to go to people who very desperately needed food is currently at risk of spoilage, according to usaid. So it's not just that people are starving, it's that we are allowing food to go bad here while people starve in other places, which is pretty bleak. I will just really briefly here, plug the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition. If you'd like to help, you can direct to them directly. And it's mutual aidsudan.org if you'd like to do that. It'll be in the show notes too, if you're driving or whatever.
- [190:34]
Hayley
And there is like ongoing legal fights over this issue. On Tuesday, February 20th 5th, another judge ordered the Trump administration to resume hundreds of million dollars of funding towards usaid. And there's no indication Trump's going to follow that order. They're already planning to appeal again. They have already appealed before and like we've seen them continually deny court orders from judges, find loopholes, find workarounds. And Musk and Trump continue to just openly float like defying the order of the court. Representative Andy Ogles introduced articles of impeachment against a specific, quote, unquote activist judge. This will go nowhere. They don't have nearly enough numbers to make anything like this happen.
- [191:25]
James Stout
Yeah, it's a frontal assault on the separation of powers is what he's proposed.
- [191:30]
Robert Evans
Right.
- [191:32]
James Stout
They don't have the numbers here yet.
- [191:34]
Hayley
Yes, well, and then they have openly floated, just like defying orders because, yeah, they are. They're interpreting the actions of the judges as like themselves, unlawful. But Musk has himself called to impeach judges who violate the law. And I believe his, his most recent pinned pinned X post reads, quote, if any judge Anywhere can block every presidential action everywhere. We do not have a demonstration democracy. We have a tyranny of the judiciary.
- [192:04]
James Stout
So what a great legal mind we.
- [192:07]
Dan
Were saying and back in 2023.
- [192:11]
Hayley
So this will, this will continue. I mean, I'm, I'm really, really waiting for a final showdown between Trump, Elon, and, you know, maybe the Supreme Court and, you know, seeing. Seeing if they will actively defy a ruling from the Supreme Court if they indeed rule against Trump, Trump and Musk. But until then, I feel like we're just kind of all chugging along as, as the Trump administration, you know, very, very unconstitutionally defies the authority of the court.
- [192:36]
James Stout
Yep.
- [192:37]
Hayley
In some related news, last week, President Trump signed an executive order stating that the President can change laws.
- [192:44]
Nathan King
Cool.
- [192:44]
Hayley
Erroneously citing Article 2, which only calls for the President to, quote, faithfully execute the law. I'm gonna going to quote from the order. The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President's supervision and control, will interpret the law for the executive branch instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations. The next section is titled Reining in Independent Agencies. It reads, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and securities and Exchange Commission have exercised enormous power over the American people without presidential oversight. These agencies issue rules and regulations without the review of the democratically elected President. They also spend American tax dollars to set priorities without consulting the President. Voters. And the President can now hold all federal agencies, not just cabinet departments, responsible for their decisions, as the Constitution demands, Unquote. This is absurd. This is, like, extremely dangerous. One of the most, like, blatant, like, attempts at power that we've seen since Dick Nixon, like, this is going to get litigated. But this is crazy. The fact that we have a President saying that he has the ability to interpret the law, something that specifically he cannot do. It's why we have three branches of government. Just openly claiming that power is very worrying. Again, I feel like every episode on Executive Disorder, I say that I'm very worried and very concerned, but that does continue to be the case.
- [194:17]
James Stout
Yeah, it is very concerning. I don't know what more to say because it's mad. Like we're watching a coup happen on the timeline while everyone just continues to go shopping and stuff. Like, it's. It's pretty weird.
- [194:31]
Hayley
Speaking of shopping, I just got a fantastic Swedish M90 field jacket. It looks great. It fits tight. I'm very happy.
- [194:38]
James Stout
Incredible. Garrison's becoming a milsurp.
- [194:41]
Hayley
We will go on break once again to come back to talk about the Navy and the FBI. All right. We are back. Let's now talk about the Navy, arguably one of the gayer branches of the military besides the, besides the drone operators.
- [195:10]
Dan
Oh, you're, you're really missing out on the Marines. As multiple Marine veterans have told me, the US Marine Corps is the gayest place I've ever been.
- [195:22]
Hayley
The Marines are like part of the Navy, right? Come on.
- [195:24]
Dan
They are, they are, they are. And they hate it when you say that.
- [195:29]
Hayley
Go cry about it to Daddy Trump. I don't care.
- [195:33]
Dan
It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun.
- [195:36]
Hayley
So meanwhile, there is shakeups in the Navy and the Marines relating to Trump's anti trans executive orders. And we have obtained an al nave memo directed to all Navy units and marine Corps from February 25th that outlines the Department of Navy's guidance on how to implement the anti trans executive orders. Now, this includes ending programs and policies related to quote, unquote, gender ideology all across the Navy, as well as only using assigned sex at birth on official documentation. I will quote from, from the, from the statement, quote, don Entities will review policies for quote, unquote, intimate single sex spaces and take appropriate action to ensure such spaces are designated by sex and not gender identity on installations, facilities, ships and any other infrastructure under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy, unquote. So this will force women into bathrooms and barracks with men. It's in line with the stuff that like Trump's been talking about and the stuff that he's been signing. But we are slowly getting more and more of these implementation guides getting sent around to various departments. James.
- [196:45]
James Stout
Yeah, and like, just to clarify that to people, most of these bases are pretty full, right? These are pretty crowded places. So this will mean women sharing rooms with young Marines, right? This will mean them sharing non stalled bathrooms with young sailors and Marines, right? This will force them into very confined spaces together on board ship, ships. This isn't like some kind of sort of minor inconvenience or whatever like this. This will put these people at a demonstrable risk for assault, for bullying, which is a serious thing and an issue in lots of militaries, including the US One. But like, and many of these people, I should add, like, have had, they're like post surgery, right? And not that it matters hugely, but they're people who might pass as women or men and they're now forced to, to live according to their gender assigned at birth. Pretty fucked up.
- [197:43]
Hayley
It's not great. I'm going to wait before I do reporting on the, the implementation guides for visas. I know there's been a lot of articles in the Guardian and a few trans journalists have conflicting interpretations of a few Department of State cables regarding the issuing of visas to, to people who are trans. Specifically, I think the main cable that we've seen allows the continued issuance of visas, but that would only match what the case officer or whoever is handling the actual visa information, whatever they determine to be the assigned gender at birth to be. That's how it would get issued. But I'm going to wait to report on kind of the rest of the nitty gritty details because there is conflict, conflicting information from these policy wonks, lawyers and journalists themselves who are trying to figure out what the full implications of those cables are. But we are aware of them. We've been talking about them in our chat. Yes, they are bad, but I don't necessarily want to overblow the scope of some of these things just to induce panic when really this is all very in line with Trump's earlier order. Orders to only have male and female documentation that matches assigned gender at birth.
- [199:04]
James Stout
Yeah. I will say also if you are soldier, sailor, airman, air person, marine, whatever, and these executive orders are affecting you, you can email us. Coolzonetipsoton me. I know trans folks tend to serve at a higher rate than cisgender folks, so there's a good number of people who will be affected by this. And like, for whatever it's worth, if you want to talk to us, you can reach out to us.
- [199:31]
Hayley
I'm also going to note we obtain information on the Department of Defense removing travel coverage for abortion. On January 18th, Department of Defense Travel Management Office removed a section from their joint travel regulations that outlined travel allowances for quote, non covered reproductive health care, quote, meaning like abortion and assisted reproductive technologies, technology like ivf. Now this, this change was directly in compliance with Trump's executive order to enforce the Hyde Amendment, which Mia has talked about lots before on the show. And then on February 4th, they actually re established coverage for assisted reproductive technology. So probably just ivf. But abortion was not re established.
- [200:12]
Molly White
Yeah.
- [200:12]
James Stout
So that means that travel cover for abortion related medical care, reproduce health care is no longer there.
- [200:22]
Hayley
Correct?
- [200:22]
Robert Evans
Correct.
- [200:23]
Hayley
Yeah. For our last main story, I'd like to talk a little bit about updates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump goon rap producer and children's book author Kash Patel has been confirmed as FBI director. And Patel is joined by far right podcaster and conspiracy theorist Dan Patel Chino, who has been appointed deputy director.
- [200:47]
Dan
Oh God. And look, I, I gotta say it, I'm just Glad there's an adult in the room now. You know, this is.
- [200:54]
Hayley
Thank God again, like, I don't want to just be talking about how, how, you know, kooky everything is in the student administration, but this is wild.
- [201:01]
James Stout
Yes, this is bonus.
- [201:02]
Dan
No, no, no, Garrison, I disagree. And that's because I have professional solidarity. Anything that's good for podcasters in general, you know, is, is. Is. Is good for the country.
- [201:15]
Hayley
That's not. Not great. Not great. Last week, Patel told senior officials he wants to relocate upwards of 1500 employees from DC to field offices around the country. And in a statement on last Friday, which is February 21, Patel said, quote, anyone that wishes to do harm to our way of life and ourselves, citizens here and abroad, will face the full wrath of the DOJ and the FBI. If you seek to hide in any corner of this country or planet, we will put on the world's largest manhunt and we will find you and we will decide your end. State, unquote. Agents and government employees have warned that under Patel, the bureau will be on course to refocus efforts away from far right street fighters and accelerationists and towards the nebulous BLM and Antifa. In related news on Tuesday, a far right extremist named Joe Kent was confirmed as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent is a former Special Forces and CIA operative. He's described himself as an American first populist and has strong ties to the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. Kent has praised Joey Gibson for standing up to Antifa. And Kent himself employed a proud Boy boy to consult on a failed congressional campaign in 2022. Kent has historically advocated that the FBI refocus their efforts to target Antifa. And this is like all amidst a report from the Guardian suggesting that the Nazi accelerationist group, the base, has had a decent resurgence in activity and recruitment efforts inside the United States.
- [202:56]
James Stout
That's good.
- [202:57]
Hayley
So not cool stuff happening. Read the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I guess I'll close. Unless we have any other thoughts on Kent or Patel or our podcaster deputy director.
- [203:10]
James Stout
What are you supposed to say?
- [203:12]
Hayley
All right.
- [203:13]
Dan
I mean, I do think it's funny that because of the number of podcasters that have been hired, there have been statements by people in the administration that, like, there aren't going to be any more conservative podcasters because we're giving them all government jobs.
- [203:28]
James Stout
Well, that's more HIMS advertising dollars for us.
- [203:33]
Dan
That's right. That's right. I feel like this is going to be huge for us.
- [203:36]
Hayley
I would like to close on three more funny news moments from the past week, Elon Musk danced round with a chainsaw at CPAC while multiple of his ex wives and baby mamas pleaded for him on Twitter to respond to emergencies regarding his children. Including that. Including that weird far right journalist in Babylon, bee contributor who is. Who has had an increasing spat with Musk and now I believe has filed for complete custody of their child.
- [204:07]
James Stout
Yeah, well, I mean, good luck, I guess.
- [204:10]
Hayley
I guess good luck.
- [204:12]
James Stout
I can't think of a worse situation to be in than Elon Musk being one of your legal parents. So for the sake of that child, I hope this he succeeds.
- [204:21]
Hayley
Tesla stock is down nearly 30% this month. There's been a real pressure on him because people in Europe are refusing to buy Teslas in a boycott. You know, upset at him for. For doing the whole Nazi salute and being a Nazi thing. And. And finally, in some very sad news, a crypto trader killed himself live on a Twitter space in order to start a meme point. Sorry, sorry. On an X space in order to start a meme coin. How do we feel about this, folks? I know it's a dark time for our community.
- [204:55]
James Stout
They did start the meme coin.
- [204:56]
Hayley
Multiple meme coins actually were started.
- [204:59]
James Stout
Well, well done for all the people cashing in on the guy shooting himself in the head and then bleeding out for 30 minutes on stream. You are vampires. I don't know.
- [205:08]
Hayley
Not the cool kind.
- [205:09]
James Stout
No. Yeah, not the. Not the cool kind. The evil kind. Vultures. Vultures can be cool as well.
- [205:17]
Hayley
I guess it depends.
- [205:18]
Robert Evans
Yeah.
- [205:18]
Hayley
Well, I think that's it for us. We reported the news again.
- [205:25]
Mark Seale
We reported the news.
- [205:30]
Dan
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
- [205:36]
Robert Evans
It Could Happen Here is a production.
- [205:38]
American Express Representative
Of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.
- [205:41]
Hayley
Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for. It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
- [205:53]
American Express Representative
Thanks for listening.